People are discovering the truth about their biological parents with DNA—and learning that incest is far more common than many think.

The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.

Most of the people affected may never know about their parentage, but these days, many are stumbling into the truth after AncestryDNA and 23andMe tests.

  • idiomaddict@feddit.de
    2·
    8 months ago

    That’s possible, though I gotta assume they use tracking. Actually, I wonder if it’s just as common outside of private mode

      • idiomaddict@feddit.de
        3·
        8 months ago

        I mean, I just use a private window as a matter of course because I use the auto complete for common websites and I don’t want anything untoward showing up if I’m looking something up in front of people. I gotta assume that’s pretty common, no matter what people are into.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
          3·
          8 months ago

          Yes, the bigger problem is when people think a private window does more than forget their search history and cookies on their device