Inbreeding may have caused Darwin family ills, study suggests
Date:May 3, 2010
Source: Science Daily via Ohio State University
Summary:
New research suggests that Charles Darwin's family was a living human example of a theory that he developed about plants: that inbreeding could negatively affect the health and number of resulting offspring.
"New research suggests that Charles Darwin's family was a living human example of a theory that he developed about plants: that inbreeding could negatively affect the health and number of resulting offspring.
Darwin was married to his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood. They had 10 children, but three died before age 10, two from infectious diseases. And three of the six surviving children with long-term marriages did not produce any offspring -- a "suspicious" sign, researchers say, that these Darwins could have had reproductive problems because of their lineage.
Studies have shown that susceptibility to infectious disease and unexplained infertility are risk factors of consanguineous marriage -- unions of people related by birth.
Scientists at Ohio State University and in Spain traced the genealogy of the Darwin and Wedgwood families for four generations. Darwin's mother and grandfather also were Wedgwoods, and his mother's parents were third cousins.
The researchers used these data to run calculations in a specialized computer program to determine what is called an "inbreeding coefficient," or the probability that an individual received two identical copies of a gene resulting from marriages among relatives.
The analysis showed a positive association between child mortality and the inbreeding coefficient for Charles Darwin's children and others in the Darwin/Wedgwood families, suggesting that matching damaging genetic traits from the blood-relative parents could have influenced the health of the offspring.
Darwin authored three botanical books showing that cross-fertilization was much more beneficial than self-fertilization for maintaining robust and plentiful plant species. He began to worry about the effects of Darwin-Wedgwood inbreeding on his own family after the death of his daughter, Annie, of tuberculosis at age 10 -- the second of his children to die young.
"He fretted that the ill health of his children might be due to the nature of the marriage, and he came to that because of his work on plants. He realized that with breeding of any kind, it's better to cross-breed than to put close relatives together," said Tim Berra, lead author of the study and professor emeritus of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at Ohio State's Mansfield campus."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/rele.../2010/05/100503111420.htm
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