Hey, Betty Jean, We's OK after all!

There are several things about this link that cause me to think. One of them is that it was Canadian research that concluded it was OK to marry your cousin.

The other is the recollection of a couple of distinctly subnormal families in the town where I grew up in which intimate relations, if not marriage, between relations were the rule rather than the exception. Now granted, there was nobody filming things. Perhaps the collectively low IQ resulted from closer degrees of consanguinity than first cousins. Members of one of the families, which boasted 27 offspring, admitted they weren't quite sure who was the parent of whom.

The music halls had it right a long while back with "I'm my own grandpa." I think this hypothesis might need further study.