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by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child.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.

      • MagicShel
        83·
        8 months ago

        You’re overplaying your hand here. Parent/child incest implies rape if the child is underage. Adult sibling/underage sibling implies rape. But incest of siblings who are similar age (whether adult or child) doesn’t necessarily imply rape. Even incest of a parent and their adult child doesn’t imply rape.

        Statistically I’d bet this is predominantly rape and you are largely correct, but by saying incest = rape you’ve overstepped a bit.

            • Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              71·
              8 months ago

              That dude sounds like he’s projecting. You’re just trying to clear up something that matters when talking about these sort of topics.

              • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
                41·
                8 months ago

                Yeah, it’s like those aggressive pedo hunters who DEFINITELY aren’t pedophile, but then get caught with a massive CP collection or during an attempt to woo a little kid.