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Laura Creighton's avatar

I'd be interested in looking at child mortality in the Jamaicans studied in the 1920s. One way you could get oversampling of people with certain mental issues in the middle class is if it contributed to early childhood death among the poor, but not among the middle class.

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AG2023's avatar

A great and insightful post as always Peter. Some questions I have: I remember in your 2022 post of how Europe pushed ahead; well over 1,000 years ago, was due to, in part, the broadening in the ninth century by church and state of banning cousin marriages to any couple who shared a common ancestor seven generations previously. As this expanded the Western European pattern of late marriage, celibacy and nuclear households, etc. was the reason this wasn't dysgenic and negative for population growth was that the European populations across the Hajnal line were more homogeneous than in modern times? As late marriage to people beyond third and forth cousins did not have the same effect on embryos in the past, as today, is the difference also between Medieval agricultural communities versus today's modern urban communities?

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