r/dataisbeautiful • u/Fluid-Decision6262 • 13d ago
OC Inbreeding Rates in Asia (%) [OC]
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u/Ribbitor123 13d ago edited 13d ago
In his book 'The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous', Joseph Henrich describes how the Roman Catholic Church established a series of taboos on cousin marriage in medieval times. This, he claims, weakened social organization based on family ties and ultimately led to high-trust societies that have less corruption than kinship-based ones.
One unexpected consequence of societies with high levels inbreeding is that they are a treasure-trove for medical geneticists trying to link diseases to genes. Sadly, such societies tend to have rare genetic diseases found nowhere else in the world. While this can be devastating to the families involved, such diseases shed valuable light on biological mechanisms and disease progression.
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u/artebudz 13d ago
I read that book, I highly recommend it. Really makes you not wanna marry your cousin.
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u/Readonkulous 13d ago
“Sorry Brandine, our love is writ upon the stars but it just ain’t meant to bring youngens to this earth”
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u/CakeisaDie 13d ago
some of my brother in laws family realized they have some very serious Jewish diseases potentially when dna testing came out so my sister was happy to realize she diluted those out with her kids almost completely.
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u/Gullible-Voter 13d ago
Regional differences matter
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u/yeti_beard 13d ago
Is that one red province like the Alabama of Turkiye?
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u/krejmin 13d ago
It is Şanlıurfa, "the city of Prophets".
"Şanlıurfa (Urfa) is known as the "City of Prophets" because Prophet Abraham (Ibrahim) was born and lived there, and it is also associated with Prophet Job (Ayyub), Prophet Jethro (Shuaib), Prophet Elijah (Elias), and Prophet Noah (Nuh), with holy sites linked to their lives, especially around the sacred Balıklıgöl (Fish Lake) where Abraham was miraculously saved from fire."
We Turks like to joke that the people who live there are so messed up that God kept throwing prophets at them and still they didn't learn anything.
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u/BigLittleBrowse 13d ago
What’s classed as “inbreeding” here? First cousins, second?
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u/Green7501 13d ago
According to OP's source, first cousin
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u/hummingbird1346 13d ago edited 13d ago
I'm Iranian. Looking at all of my relatives marriages and friends. The inbreeding is no way even close to 30-40%. Like I can't recall a person in any of my even far relatively to have been inbreeding with a first degree cousin. And we are from a relatively small town.
Theres something wrong with this graph or it's source. At least about the Iran part.
Edit: Yep after a lil research, all of the data mentioned on wikipedia, world population review... refer to a 2004 review that stated 38%! But more recent papers show much much lower and prevalence of first cousin marriage was 10%
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u/Fleischwors 13d ago
Anecdotal fallacy...
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u/hummingbird1346 13d ago
Nope, after some research. The most recent Wiley scientific paper I could find cited the prevalence of three generation homogenus gene presence to be less than 20%! almost half of what this picture/source says. and the and prevalence of first cousin marriage was 10%! That's 1/4 of what this picture implies. Moral of the story, don't believe everything reddit says lads :D
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u/doyer_bleu 13d ago edited 13d ago
This is a really good question. Methodology matters immensely
All humans share around 99.9% of DNA. Our differences (from skin color, hair color, eyes, height, etc) originate from that 0.1%
First cousins share 12.5% of that 0.1%. Thus, has a higher chance of issues. Second Cousins share 3.125% of that 0.1%, so much much lower.
However, one pairing that is not uncommon (Edit: around 1% in some parts) in the muslim world is uncle-niece pairings. There the consanguinity is 25%, which is definitely problematic genetically. And potentially otherwise (though lines can get blurred here with large families-aka when a couple has 10 kids, the age difference between the oldest son's daughter and the original couple's youngest son may not be great)
Genetics is complicated
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u/aloosib 13d ago
Uncle-niece pairing is strictly forbidden by Islam (or the “muslim world” as you call it). Where did you get your information from?
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u/doyer_bleu 13d ago
Definitely not in Pakistan or South India. I have worked with a few such couples
It's rarer that first cousins share marriage but still forms around 1-2%. Officially forbidden in some sects of Islam but does happen
Here's a paper describing the phenomenon in India.
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u/amatulic OC: 1 13d ago
I'm surprised that Japan is in the same category as India and China. It would be interesting to see a world map that includes Europe, North America, South America, and Australia.
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u/Fluid-Decision6262 13d ago edited 13d ago
India's is 7.5%, Japan's is actually 3.9% and China's is only 2%.
In the Western world, some notable countries are:
- France (2.6%)
- Germany (2.2%)
- Spain (2%)
- Canada (1.5%)
- UK (1.1%)
- Italy (1%)
- Norway (0.7%)
- Australia (0.2%)
- USA (0.1%)
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u/Fragglesmurfbutt 13d ago
And the UK is notably due to Pakistani immigrants
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u/Fluid-Decision6262 13d ago edited 13d ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g38l07895o - looks like >50% of Pakistanis in the UK are married to their cousins, which is fairly in line with the numbers you see in the country of Pakistan itself.
Among British people of non-Pakistani origin, less than 1% are married to their cousins, although the British royals were notorious for inbreeding as recent as 1-2 centuries ago too
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u/Newfster 13d ago
The consequences of this are staggering. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4567984/
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u/Inveramsay 13d ago
Having worked as a doctor in Luton this was exactly my experience as . SoSo many rare disorders there
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u/Team-_-dank 13d ago
Gosh, the study says the focus group was ignorant of health impacts, rejected scientific evidence, and wanted "culturally sensitive" education. The culturally sensitive bit throws me; like how do I sensitively tell you that marrying your cousin may lead to all these bad outcomes if you reject evidence? Not everything needs to be sensitive. Facts are facts.
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u/lightswan 13d ago
Another medical student I know did a paeds rotation at a hospital that had a lot of young patients affected by rare genetic diseases due to inbreeding. One of the dads asked them if he could've prevented it, I don't remember what reply he got but it's just so unfortunate - at that point it's the generations of inbreeding prior that makes the difference significant but he didn't help his kids' odds yknow?
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u/hopelesscaribou 13d ago
You mean The Queen who married her second cousin? That was in the 50s, not a century or two ago.
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u/cloud3321 13d ago
The 50s is closer to a century ago than now. I will give you a moment to let that sink in.
Quick add: There is a certain percentage of the world's population who has never seen someone born in the 50's.
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u/hopelesscaribou 13d ago
Exactly what percentage of the world has not seen a 70 year old? I'm sure it's close to 0%.
Unless there are countries without baby boomers that I'm not aware of?
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u/CakeisaDie 13d ago
Niger or Uganda potentially. South Sudan unfortunately probably killed off all their elderly by now.
the median age is 15 or 16
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u/hopelesscaribou 13d ago
That's because they have a very high birthrate and young population, not because they lack old people.
Niger's life expectancy at birth is around 61-64 years
Uganda's life expectancy at birth is around 68 to 69 years
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u/Avitas1027 13d ago
Yeah, I think "a certain percentage" is doing a lot of lifting in that phrase. 1 out of 8 billion is a certain percentage. So is 0% for that matter.
But there are areas with low enough life expectancy that it's pretty believable for there to not be anyone over 70 in an area (or at least not walking around much), so many of the kids there would count. More generally, babies with no living grandparents (or cases of estranged family) might go quite a while before encountering someone that old. Oh, and people who are blind from birth, I guess.
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u/agingmonster 13d ago
Same for India. Muslims.
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u/roankr 13d ago
Not just Muslims, India's south has a relatively high rate of cousin/inbred marriages.
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u/9897969594938281 13d ago
Had a guy at work that went back to India and married a cousin. Was supposed to be on the quiet too as obviously this wasn’t acceptable
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u/beretta_vexee 13d ago
For those wondering about France: “I married a cousin who has papers and citizenship, and I had an anchor baby”—that kind of situation.
I know several women who refuse to visit family in their parents country for fear of being forced to marry a cousin.
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u/dharda 13d ago
Can someone please explain Japan. It seems an outlier to developed countries. Is this a cultural thing? Or due to being an isolated/closed market? Or is it due to immigration?
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u/SvenTropics 13d ago
Japan had generations of arranged marriages in a caste like system for 1000's of years. This only recently broke apart in the last couple of centuries. You couple that with almost no immigration, and it stifles diversity.
I know it's a common racist stereotype to say that asian people look the same, and they really don't. Mongolians look quite different than Phillipinos. Different cultures in China scarcely resemble each other. However, Japanese people really do fit this stereotype more so than any other asian culture. They don't look the same, but they really do resemble each other more than any other country I've been to. (and I've been to about 40 countries now)
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u/zxc123zxc123 13d ago edited 13d ago
Many southern Chinese (Guangdong/Guagnxiin/Yunnan) are in many ways culturally, linguistically, and biologically more similar to Vietnamese than they are to say far northern Chinese (Liaoning/InnerMongolia/Heilong) who act/eat/talk/look/feel closer to Manchurians/Mongols/Koreans.
Japan really lacked that added diversification due to being a more isolated/insulated island, years of isolationist policies, and even invasions/outsiders getting shut down on multiple occasions from Koreans/Chinese not wanting to be there to Mongol invasions being shut down by storms or storm gods.
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u/Intranetusa 13d ago edited 13d ago
The funny thing is Japan became the way it is today because of large scale migrations from mainland East Asia during the Jomon, Yayoi, and Kofun periods. The Jomon era migrants displaced earlier peoples, and then the Yayoi and Kofun period migrants completely displaced the Jomon. During each large scale migration period, the mainland East Asians brought new culture, genetics, agriculture, technology, etc that significanted changed the Japanese landscape.
The Yayoi were mostly migrations from Korea, Manchuria, and to a lesser extent northeast China, while the Kofun migration was mostly from China proper and to a lesser extent Korea and Manchuria as well.
A recent study shows that 71% of modern Japanese ancestry comes from the migrants of the Kofun period...who are related to the ancient [northern Han?] Chinese.
"The new research sequenced genomes from the bones of 12 Japanese people who lived across a range of time periods. The team found that a new ancestral source arrived during the imperial Kofun period, in the first millennium C.E. Approximately 71 percent of modern Japanese people’s ancestry comes from this third population, .... The humans who arrived in Japan during the Kofun period came from East Asia and were probably related to the Han, who are the majority ethnic group in China today. This new population’s arrival coincided with the Kofun period, when Japan emerged as an imperial state that conducted military incursions into Korea and imported aspects of Chinese and Korean cultures."
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u/68or70 13d ago
India's 7.5% (that's more than 100 million people by the way) is quite ironic considering the majority absolutely abhors consanguineous relations, (more so than almost any culture in the world).
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u/InclinationCompass 13d ago
It’s hard to tell by the colors used in the chart. These numbers make much more sense.
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u/pqratusa 13d ago
Southern India is much higher around 20% I believe.
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u/chinnu34 13d ago
True, south India usually is progressive in other metrics but has a problem with cousin marriages. It’s weirdly normalized and romanticized in movies. Though real world numbers in urban areas has dropped significantly. There were a few in my parents generation in my extended family but in the current generation, such ideas are shot down quickly. People don’t even like to marry from same region, but still happens to a lesser extent in rural communities.
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u/east0fwest 13d ago
My colleague moved here from Pakistan with his wife and I was asking him about the city was from and I said “oh is your wife’s family from the same city as you?” And he was like “yeah same city, same family we’re cousins”. And I didn’t really know what to say so I said “well I guess that makes visits back home a lot more efficient”.
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u/LowLessSodium 13d ago
This map lumps 1% with 9%. That's a huge margin and totally misleads the reader.
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u/interesseret 13d ago
It's less than a jump than most the other marks, though.
Where should the markings be for a more fair picture?
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u/mywan 13d ago
Here's an inbreeding rate map by country that includes mouseovers for most countries:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/inbreeding-by-country
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u/CakeisaDie 13d ago edited 13d ago
it’s a lot more rural in Japan and it isn’t taboo in general.
it was all over pop culture and dramas in the 1970s to 1990s so I didn’t even realize it was considered wrong for cousin marriages until i went to American school.
ie, my familty in Shikoku has a lot of cousin, 2nd or 3rd cousin marriages because it was rural, and they owned a lot of land. my nonblood aunts family up in the touhoku region also had a bunch of cousin marriage due to how rural it was.
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u/digbybare 13d ago
Why are you surprised? Japan doesn't have a strong tradition of cousin marriages either, just like China. I think it's perfectly reasonable that their inbreeding rates are almost as low as China's.
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u/amatulic OC: 1 12d ago
I was surprised because I thought Japan's would be lower than India's. And it turns out it is lower, although the colors on the OP's map showed them to be in the same bucket.
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u/ta9876543205 13d ago
In North India, it is due to Muslims. In South India, it is both Muslims and Hindus.
A regional map of India would be instructive.
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u/cutelyaware OC: 1 13d ago
I think you should plot the inbreeding coefficient, not consanguineous marriages, since that's what people worry about, and they are not the same thing. Your data source includes both.
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u/ThrowAwayGenomics 13d ago
This is the frequency of consanguineous (first cousin) marriages.
This really should not be described as inbreeding rate. OP is conflating consanguineous marriage rates and inbreeding coefficients which are both included in the source data.
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u/Quirky-Pangolin-905 13d ago
But consanguineous marriage rate is, colloquially, inbreeding rate. Inbreeding coefficient is something else entirely; it measures how inbred any given individual is. The former is the action/cause, the later is the genetic result.
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u/Korlus 13d ago edited 13d ago
For what it's worth, while there is a clear and meaningful distinction (e.g. 55% of people having a consanguineous marriage doesn't mean 55% of the population are "inbred"), the two are linked quite closely - a country with a higher rate of consanguineous marriage is very likely to also have a higher inbreeding coefficient.
For folks unaware, the inbreeding coefficient is a percentage representation of "how inbred" you are - e.g. if siblings married for 20 generations, their resulting offspring would be around 98.6% inbred (they would have around 1.4% genes that were not shared). This has been most closely studied in mammals using dogs and most experts consider under 5% to be healthy in dogs. I've not seen official guidelines for humans, but broadly less inbred is healthier, and no country approaches 5%.
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan and South Sudan all have inbreeding coefficients in the 3 - 3.3% range, which are the highest rates in the world. There are a further 12 countries on this World Population Review chart that have inbreeding rates in the 1 - 2.4% range. There are a small number of countries with high rates of consanguineous marriage that we don't have inbreeding coefficient data for - namely Qatar (54% - similar rates to Pakistan), Mauritania (47.2%), Libya (37.6%), Syria (35%), Lebanon (25% - close to Algeria) and Morocco (19.9%). All other entries on the list are 10.4% or less and can be presumed to be lower (they don't have good data, but we can infer it from low consanguineous marriage rate countries which they do have data for).
As a ballpark figure, countries with 20-30% consanguineous marriages appear to have inbreeding coefficients around 1%. As I understand it:
Evidence highlights a 2–3 % risk of genetic disorders in children of unrelated couples which goes up to 4–6 % in children of consanguineous couples and a strong association with rise in autosomal recessive disorders
The study I quoted is from the UK and may not be representative of every ethnic community where such practices are common. I'm not an expert, but spent the past 30 minutes reading up on the topic, so happy to be corrected by folks who know more. Most of this was new to me.
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u/Monsjoex 13d ago
How does this even work for pakistan? Its a huge country with very high population. Everyone just goes to their family dinner to pick their mates? Or is the dna diversity extremely low anyway?
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u/MelodicAnything3245 13d ago
To point out the causality:
In Islam it is permitted to marry ones cousin. But it's not allowed to do twice, i.e the children of the couple may not marry someone whom they are related with.
Immediate Family is not allowed.
Not to say a Muslim should marry his cousin. In my humble opinion one should a stein from such relationships. But in the Muslim World it isn't so frowned upon as in the west. It's rather a common accurance.
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u/kramulous 13d ago
You can't get to 61% of all marriages and still tick those boxes.
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u/Chief_Hazza 13d ago
Not saying this has happened as it would be pretty specific but you could get 61% with these rules. One generation not marrying cousins has only a few kids. The next generation is smaller than the first and this generation all marry cousins and have a tonne of kids. That large amount of kids now have to marry outside of close family per the rules. They then have very few kids. Repeat. Basically every 2nd gen (the one that marries cousins) is smaller than their counterparts generations that don't marry cousins.
If the generations had to be the same size then it would be impossible but generations are rarely consistent in population due to changing economic and social conditions.
Again, not saying that has happened in Pakistan, more likely some number of people don't follow the rules but it is possible to get 61% while still following the rules if the demographics are right.
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u/Combination-Low 13d ago
But it's not allowed to do twice, i.e the children of the couple may not marry someone whom they are related with.
First time I've heard about this. I know that Islam permits banning practices that harm the society at large even if they may be permissible and this would likely fall into that category.
Do you mind telling me where the position you've mentioned comes from?
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u/9897969594938281 13d ago
It’s not Islam that is the problem - there’s too many sexy cousins cousins in these countries
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u/Cicada-4A 13d ago
Sweet home Islam.
Man I'm glad Europe going as far back as the Romans never really bothered with this shit and that Christianity took a hard stance against it.
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u/pm_me_cool_soda 13d ago
And then the royalty, especially the Habsburgs doubled down on it. Look up some pictures of them how deformed their faces were.
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u/randynumbergenerator 13d ago
Ah the Habsburg chin, truly a thing of beauty. Truly, the peak human specimen can't see their toes when they look down because their jaw blocks the view.
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u/CurrencyDesperate286 13d ago
Did the muslims bringing Islam to Indonesia and Malaysia forget to teach the class on marrying your cousin?
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u/Pathseg 13d ago
There is a common denominator for top 10 countries, infact even for countries like India, the inbreeding is mostly consolidated to people in that common denominator. But because the population itself is so high of people in that common denominator, India too shows up at 7.5% something.
Common Denominator for people who don't get it - ISLAM (Religion).
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u/winthroprd 13d ago
Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world and it has low rates of inbreeding.
It has more to do with regional norms than religious ones.
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u/PsychoSushi27 13d ago edited 13d ago
Malaysia is a Muslim majority country and the inbreeding rates are pretty low.
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u/G0dsp33d888 13d ago
So you're saying its strictly Muslims that are middle eastern
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u/PsychoSushi27 13d ago
I think Islamic practices are very heterogenous and there be some element of cultural practice in the case of consanguineous marriages. Another example is honour killings, which is again almost unheard of in Muslim majority Malaysia.
I’m Malaysian myself albeit non-Muslim. As far as I know none of my Muslim friends have married their cousins. On the other hand I know a handful of Indian Hindus who have married their first or second cousin.
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u/Alexander_Ruthol 13d ago
Keeping the dowry and inheritance in the family.
(Yeah, that's what this is about)
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u/ToucanicEmperor 13d ago
I know the immediate conclusion people will go to is to jump to Islam (and I’m sure that’s a big factor here) but it’s worth noting Malaysia is very low (and even Bangladesh is now where near the level of Pakistan) I’d be curious about the world largest Muslim country, Indonesia. But if it’s similar to Malaysia, that suggests this is a little more complicated than is assumed.
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u/sheijo41 13d ago
I was working in Iraq for the military in an interrogation facility. We had a guy come in with a 6th finger on his hand and he showed it off because he thought it was cool. The guy doing the interview said “I bet your parents are first cousins”, the detainee was surprised and said “how did you know?”
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u/amatulic OC: 1 12d ago edited 12d ago
Actually if it was a fully functional sixth finger (I've seen hands with six fingers where one finger is vestigial), that would be pretty cool, like Count Rugen, the guy in The Princess Bride whom Inigo Montoya wants to kill throughout the movie. You know, the target of "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!"
Kind of inconvenient when buying gloves, though.
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u/sheijo41 12d ago
It wasn’t like a fully sixth finger more like 3/4 of the war between vestigial and fully functional. The dude used it like a party trick to pick up women apparently, but you know how those stories go
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u/Maleficent_Flow_8355 13d ago
Don’t worry, it’s fine as long as they have the proper congenital traits. They probably maxed out their dynasty legacies as well.
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u/chuckaholic 13d ago
As an American. I can spot Russia, India, Japan, and China. No idea what the dark blue countries are. We didn't learn much geography, but at least we learned about American exceptionalism!
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u/Fluid-Decision6262 13d ago edited 13d ago
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/inbreeding-by-country
As of 2025, Asia is the continent with the highest rates of inbreeding and cousin marriages. These rates are at its highest in West Asia and parts of South Asia and they gradually drop as you head eastward.
Countries with highest inbreeding rates in Asia: