Genetics is not Politically Correct

"A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband"1Actually, it seems that good marriages occur between a deaf husband and a deaf wife: Such is the attraction that, in the United States, 85% of individuals with profound deafness marry another deaf person. One consequence of this, according to a potentially explosive article in the American Journal of Human Genetics, is that the incidence of nonsyndromic deafness may have increased two-fold over the past 200 years.2The article is

Written byRichard Gallagher

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"A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband"¹

Actually, it seems that good marriages occur between a deaf husband and a deaf wife: Such is the attraction that, in the United States, 85% of individuals with profound deafness marry another deaf person. One consequence of this, according to a potentially explosive article in the American Journal of Human Genetics, is that the incidence of nonsyndromic deafness may have increased two-fold over the past 200 years.²

The article is labeled "Perspective" and, notably, carries a caution that it represents the authors' opinions and has not been peer reviewed. Authors Walter Nance and Michael Kearsey describe a computer simulation that shows how assortative mating accelerates the genetic response to relaxed selection. In other words, the removal of a strong selective pressure against a particular mutated form of a gene, combined with reproduction by phenotypically similar individuals, increases ...

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