consanguineous marriages on the offspring,” he concludes, “is proven by many positive facts” [25].
Consanguineous Marriages
The final part of the third essay, and thus, the conclusion of the entire treatise, appeared in the December issue, but unlike the previous installments, it did not open the issue.52 Subtitled “The Influence of Consanguineous Marriages,” it continued the discussion of the subject began in the previous part. Here Florinskii surveyed the arguments of the advocates of consanguineous marriages and presented his own views on the subject. He concluded the treatise with a discussion of the role of the law in regulating marriages in order to forestall the degeneration and to promote the perfection of the human type.
Florinskii recapitulates the conclusions of the previous installment, that those scientists who argue against consanguineous marriages present numerous facts demonstrating the “harmful influences of incest on the progeny.” Yet, many equally reputed scientists maintain that consanguinity in and of itself is not the cause of those various diseases and deformities people ascribe to it. These scientists claim that this issue is much more complex than it seems at first glance and that the harmfulness of consanguineous marriages should be considered a result of “morbid heredity.”
The proponents of consanguineous marriages offer three types of evidence in support of their views: observations of inbreeding in animals, observations of individual families that for many generations inbred, and observations on the populations of certain very isolated geographical locales. According to Florinskii, evidence gathered from animal breeding provides the main foundation for the support of consanguineous marriages. Many veterinarians and agriculturalists insist that crossing (skreshchivanie) of pure-blooded animals, despite their close kinship, not only produces good results but actually improves the breed. By crossing very close relatives — fathers and daughters, sons and mothers, brothers and sisters — what English breeders
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named “breeding in and in,”53 they have created a number of very good breeds of horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, and other domesticated animals, developing them to near “perfection” [28]. This led many breeders to adopt a rule of breeding a stock “in itself,” following the idea that “the best qualities of progeny will be not only preserved but even improved in the course of generations.”
If one accepts these facts for animal stocks, some scientists argued, there was no reason not to apply them by analogy to human stocks.
Based on these facts, the advocates of consanguineous marriages formulated a special law: “consanguinity strengthens heredity to its highest power.” Thus consanguinity is favorable, if the procreators-relatives are healthy, but harmful if they have defects and deficiencies that could be transmitted and thus “strengthened” by heredity. Florinskii relates the opinion of André Sanson, an eminent French veterinarian and member of the Anthropological Society of Paris: “The better every deficiency, as well as every good quality, is transmitted to the progeny, the closer the relation among the progenitors (proizvoditeli).”54
Florinskii states that this view contradicts many observations made by agriculturalists, naturalists, and physicians, including Boudin, Devay, Darwin, and many others.55 He relates their shared opinion that the methods of producing purebred stocks by means of crossing close relatives pioneered by British breeder Robert Bakewell56 are useful only when the goal is to preserve a certain feature of the stock that is valuable to the owner, “but not for the perfection of a race in a zoological sense” [28]. Florinskii presents the view that, for the most part, what is considered the perfection of stock in many domesticated animals is at the same time a physiological defect: “these animals are nothing but physiological monsters” [29]. He sums up the objections against evidence from animal breeding: “If the breeding of relatives will continue for many generations, then the race will necessarily weaken and degenerate. This is a general law for both animals and humans.”
“Every pure breed, without renewal of blood, in the course of time, not only loses its qualities, but becomes sterile,” he continues. “A temporary usefulness of consanguinity (in a few generations), which is manifested in the increased development of certain qualities to the detriment of the organism’s general perfection, could only be applied to domesticated
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animals and only for special purposes,” he asserts forcefully, “but not to humans” [30].
Florinskii then proceeds to consider certain observations on humans made by the numerous proponents of consanguineous marriages,57 which were summarized in a special report by the Secretary of the Anthropological Society of Paris Eugène Dally.58 All of these authors claimed that such marriages were not always accompanied by harmful consequences. Each of them reported cases in which marriages between close relatives, even continuing in the same family for several generations, not only were fertile, but did not cause any of the diseases and deformities described by their opponents. Florinskii finds Dally’s examples not entirely convincing, since “to clarify the issue it is necessary to investigate the comparative frequency of appearing diseases and deformities in kin and non-kin marriages. Only such comparative statistics will allow a sound conclusion” [30]. He recounts Boudin’s objections to Dally’s arguments,59 and finds them much more convincing, since Boudin used such “comparative statistics.”
According to Florinskii, all the examples collected by the proponents of consanguineous marriages “in a scientific sense, prove neither usefulness nor harmfulness” [32] of such marriages, since they do not provide enough comparisons and enough statistics.
Florinskii then examines the third type of evidence offered by the advocates of consanguineous marriages, namely the absence of harmful consequences in the interbreeding of inhabitants of isolated locales, summarized in Dally’s report [33]. Florinskii notes that the opponents of human inbreeding such as Devay used the materials from the same locales to prove exactly the opposite conclusion, namely that consanguineous marriages are harmful. Both opponents and proponents use the same materials, mostly related to the so-called accursed races (le races maudites) in France and Spain, such as “the Pyrenees Cagots,”
“the Vaqueros of Asturias,” and “the Alpine cretins.”60 Florinskii states that “all these facts … do not offer anything concrete and conclusive. So many different conditions influence the development of the inhabitants of isolated locales that, even with the most precise analysis, it is impossible to say what is the result of consanguineous marriages and what depends on climatic conditions, hereditary diseases, material and
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moral ways of life, and so on” [33-34]. He comes to the same conclusions regarding the facts related to the consanguineous marriages among another two groups — the aristocracy and the Jews — often cited by both sides of the debate: “to isolate the influence of consanguinity from numerous physical and moral conditions not only difficult, but completely impossible.”
Despite all the uncertainties, Florinskii feels that the advocates of consanguineous marriages did not present statistical proof of their views, while their opponents did. He offers a thorough discussion of statistics as a method of investigation. The method is not perfect, he admits, in the process of collecting statistical data, certain facts are sometimes grouped incorrectly, making it difficult to discern all the external influences, and thus sometimes statistics generate “imprecise and flimsy” results [36].
But, he insists, statistics are absolutely necessary and very convenient in addressing many issues that could not be solved by any other method.
He agrees with many observers that collected statistical evidence demonstrates convincingly that kin marriages produce unfavorable consequences with much greater frequency than non-kin marriages.
Yet, according to Florinskii, this evidence does not answer the most important question of why this is so: “Is this unfavorable influence a result of consanguinity, ipso facto, even if the spouses-relatives do not have any physiological and pathological potentials (zadatki) for the weakening of the stock? Or is it a result of the doubling of their morbid heredity?” [36]. He notes that the advocates of kin marriages accentuate a difference between “healthy and morbid consanguineous marriages,”
arguing that, if the procreators are healthy, such marriages would be beneficial, and, if they are not, “hereditary diseases [would] grow and perpetuate in the descending generations.” In their opinion, the bad consequences are not the results of consanguineous marriages per se, but of hereditary diseases.
Florinskii deduces that this line of reasoning does not explain all the facts. Whether morbid or normal, for him, heredity is a replication of parental characteristics in the progeny. But, the defects of development and diseases, which are observed under the conditions of consanguinity, often appear only in progeny and, moreover, many of these deficiencies are not hereditary. For instance, deaf-mutism is
“almost never hereditary.” Florinskii refers to the expert on deaf-mutism
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French physician Prosper Menière, who demonstrated that “in the overwhelming majority of cases, a marriage of two deaf-mute parents gives birth to children who speak and hear.”61 He approvingly cites the opinion of Boudin, that to invoke heredity to explain the unfortunate consequences of consanguineous marriages is to completely distort the notion of heredity: “Consanguineous individuals, who are full of strength and health [and] do not have any deformities and deficiencies, transmit to their children not something they have, but something they themselves do not have, and this is called heredity!” [37].62
According to Florinskii, this rebuttal forced the proponents of consanguineous marriages to consider questions about heredity in general and, particularly, “about the transformation of hereditary diseases during their transmission from one generation to the next.”
They came up with the idea that a particular disease in one generation could produce “a completely different, separate disease in the next.”
The foundation of this view on “hereditary diseases,” Florinskii asserts, is a “theory of the gradual degeneration of the human type and the formation of morbid races” recently proposed by French physician Bénédict Augustin Morel.63
Florinskii gives a brief summary of Morel’s theory.64 Morel allows the possibility of the transformation of “nervous diseases” into “mental disorders” and of the latter into “physical disorders,” and so on, up to “the complete extinction of a race” [37]. “Hereditary morbidity,” according to Morel, not only causes infertility in parents and early mortality in their progeny, but also “arrests the physical and mental development of apparently healthy children, leading to the appearance of brain diseases, which, in turn, lead to idiocy or epilepsy.” Morel postulates that various “harmful influences, having generated in ancestors a nervous disease, in the progeny that is still exposed to such influences produce, sequentially, hysteria, epilepsy, hypochondria, idiocy, or insanity.” In such a way “any disease, strengthening and changing with every generation, could produce the diminution of height, scrofula or English disease, an arrest in the development of certain organs, the inborn deformities of the scull, nearsightedness, strabismus, Saint Vitus Dance, and so on” [38].
Florinskii finds Morel’s theory “ambiguous and jumbled” and not very useful in explaining the “unfortunate consequences of
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consanguineous marriages,” especially the statistically proven more frequent appearance of such consequences in kin marriages as compared to non-kin ones. Even if we accept Morel’s scheme of “hereditary morbidity,” he contends, it should work the same way in all marriages, and the number of affected progeny should be “roughly equal” in both kinds of marriages. “As we saw, however, the facts show something completely different,” he states. In his opinion, no theory could overturn statistical evidence: “the fact that consanguineous marriages very often result in infertility, various serious diseases, and deformities remains indisputable” [39].
In the end, Florinskii admits, whether one explains this fact exclusively by heredity or exclusively by consanguinity, all physicians would advise a society “to avoid kin breeding and to renew the stock with a new, alien blood in order to prevent the weakening and degeneration of the stock.” “Since there is hardly a family in our society,” he continues,
“that does not have some hereditary diseases, because similar diseases and deficiencies predominantly cluster in the same social class, then hygienic advice to mix different social strata and different families by means of marital ties in order to renew the stock with stronger and healthier elements or to paralyze and equalize morbid heredity with the heredity of an opposite quality [i.e. healthy heredity] is in any case sound.”
This long discussion of consanguineous marriages serves as a basis for Florinskii’s “glance at our civic laws on marriage from a hygienic point of view.”65 He explains that, in Russian law, the question of whether a marriage between related individuals is allowable or forbidden is decided according to the rules of the individual’s religion.
He goes on to explain that the Orthodox Christians cannot marry a relative in “the fourth degree of relationship inclusive,”66 while Jewish law is much more permissive and allows not only a marriage between an uncle and a niece, but also between an aunt and a nephew, forbidding only marriages between brothers and sisters (see fig. 3-2). Although Christian doctrine generally forbids marriages between relatives, in
“Lutheran and Catholic countries, civic laws allow marriages between the first cousins, and sometimes even between uncles and nieces or between aunts and nephews.” Thus, what is allowable for Jews, Lutherans, and Catholics, is forbidden to the Orthodox. These differences, he declares,
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derive from historical or purely theological views of various faiths. “But everyone knows that physiological laws are absolutely the same for all religious confessions,” he insists, “hence everything that is harmless for a Lutheran is harmless for a Catholic, and vice versa” [40]. On the other hand, he asserts, everyone should agree that every law, whatever issue it addresses, “could remain strong and unshakeable only when it is based on an actual need and aims at the positive guarantee of the moral and material wellbeing of the people.” Therefore, Florinskii surmises,
“a law on marriage must justly be based on physiological and hygienic data and must limit only what is, in whatever way, harmful.” All other restrictions that are “based not on scientific, positive principles, but on conscience and conviction, and whose obeying or disobeying is not injurious to the people’s wellbeing, should be left to the good will of citizens themselves.” He is convinced that “beliefs should be free and voluntary” [40].
Fig. 3-2. A table illustrating the degrees of kinship according to the Russian Orthodox Church regulations. Circles represent male and squares female members of the families.
First row (left to right): my brother, myself, my wife, brother of my wife, his wife. Second row: my nephew (son of my brother). The kinship “distance” between my brother and the wife of my wife’s brother is four degrees (therefore, a marriage between them would be prohibited). The kinship “distance” between my nephew and the wife of my wife’s brother is five degrees (therefore, a marriage between them would be permitted). From S. P. Grigorovskii, O rodstve i svoistve (SPb.: Trud, 1903), 6th ed., p. 25. Courtesy of RNB.
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While defending the freedom of religious beliefs and civic convictions, Florinskii does not condone absolute freedom of actions.
Every civic law, he argues, is created with the purpose of balancing personal benefits and life comforts of all citizens, and hence must, to a degree, limit their freedom. To be effective, a law must derive from a strong and rational foundation and its restrictions should be rationally recognized by all members of a society as a necessary condition of their personal wellbeing. Therefore, laws on marriage must put forward only those restrictions that are necessary to preserve public health. This position makes clear, he states, that a law prohibiting marriage between consanguineous individuals is well founded. But it should regulate only direct bloodlines, i.e. marriages between brothers and sisters, first cousins, uncles and nieces, aunts and nephews. Marriages among side-line relatives — “relations of the wife of my brother or of the husband of my aunt” — he asserts, should be excluded from the law, to say nothing of “spiritual relations” such as Godmother and Godfather, which were actually forbidden by the current Russian law.67 “Free action of every person, based on freely-held convictions,” would be “the best formula for a happy marriage of this kind,” he states. Florinskii is adamant that civic laws should be the same for all citizens, hence, the Russian law on marriage for Lutherans and Catholics should be extended to forbid consanguineous marriages in the direct lines of relations.
If we recognize the right of the law to regulate consanguineous marriages, Florinskii continues, we should allow the legislation “to intervene into other hygienic aspects of marriage.” For instance, he declares, we know that “many hereditary diseases (TB, epilepsy, hereditary insanity, and so on) are transmitted from parents to children,” therefore, “legislation could take certain measures against the weakening and degeneration of the stock in this way.” He foresees, however, that the implementation and enforcement of such laws would be quite difficult. Indeed, it is nearly impossible, he admits, “to establish the exact limits and concrete regulations regarding hereditary diseases:
in which cases morbid heredity is detrimental to marriage and in which it is not.” But this difficulty cannot be used as “an argument against the legislative regulation of consanguineous marriages.” The blood relations of a bride and a groom, as well as the age of prospective spouses, can be determined before marriage; therefore, Florinskii argues, in these two instances, certain rules could be established, which would not