Muslim inbreeding

Nicolai Sennels is a Danish psychologist who has done yeoman work on Muslim immigrants. An article August of last year details the consequences of Muslim inbreeding (“Muslim Inbreeding: Impacts on intelligence, sanity, health and society.“) Sennels cites data showing that on average around 50% of marriages in the Muslim world are consanguineous, with predictable effects of low intelligence and mental and physical disorders. Consanguineous marriage is lower among immigrants to the West than in the immigrant-sending countries–e.g., 55% among Pakistani immigrants to Britain versus 70% in Pakistan. The consequences to Western societies are obvious:

Expenses related to mentally and physically handicapped Muslim immigrants drains the budget for other public services: “When cousins have children together, they are twice as likely to have a disabled child – it costs municipal funds dearly. Disabled immigrant children costs Danish municipalities millions. In Copenhagen County alone, the number of disabled children in the overall increase of 100 percent at 10 years. … Meredith Lefelt has contacted 330 families with disabled children in Copenhagen. She estimates that one third of their clients have a foreign cultural background.” (BT, 10/11 2003 Immigrants inbreeding costing one million.

On top come the expenses for Muslim immigrants who – because of different consequences of being born from blood related parents – are not able to live up to the challenges of our Western work market: Muslim immigrants and their descendants in Europe have a very high rate of unemployment.

The same goes for Muslims in USA, where the Gallup Institute made a study involving 300.000 people concluding “The majority of Muslims in USA have a lower income, are less educated and have worse jobs than the population as a whole.” (Berlingske Tidende, d. 3. marts 2009: Muslims thrive in USA.

The cognitive consequences of Muslim inbreeding might explain why non-Western immigrants are more than 300 percent more likely to fail the Danish army’s intelligence test than native Danes: “19.3% of non-Western immigrants are not able to pass the Danish army’s intelligence test. In comparison, only 4.7% of applicants with Danish background do not pass.” (TV 2 Nyhederne, 13/6 2007 Immigrants flunk army test.

It probably also explains – at least partly – why two thirds of all immigrant school children with Arabic backgrounds are illiterate after 10 years in the Danish school system: “Those who speak Arabic with their parents have an extreme tendency to lack reading abilities – 64 percent are illiterate. … No matter if it concerns reading abilities, mathematics or science, the pattern is the same: The bilingual (largely Muslim) immigrants’ skills are exceedingly poor compared to their Danish classmates.” (Rockwool Foundation Research Unit, May 2007: Ethnic students does not make Danish children worse.\

These results are another indication of the fundamental differences between the West and the rest. As I noted several places (e.g., here), individualism is a biologically rooted tendency among Western peoples resulting from prolonged evolution as a Northern hunter-gatherer. When it comes to marriage, this implies tendencies toward monogamy, exogamy, the nuclear family, and individual choice of marriage partner based on personal attraction (love as the basis of marriage combined with sexual selection for physical beauty). Collectivist cultures tend toward arranged marriages with relatives, solidifying kinship relations within the extended family and maximizing parents’ relatedness to their offspring–at a huge cost, as Sennels documents.

The superiority of Western culture was obvious to our ancestors a century ago when the West dominated 85% of the globe. The prolonged assault on the West by the culture of critique has resulted in invasions by people who are dramatically different from native Europeans. In Europe people naturally gravitated to a world of friends and neighbors and exogamous marriages based on personal attraction when the costs of extended kinship relationships exceeded the  benefits. But the fundamentally collectivist, extended family social structure so typical of the rest of the world seem to be deeply ingrained and not easily altered.

It’s interesting that consanguineous marriages were typical of historical Jewish society and prescribed as ideal in the Torah. For example, fully half of the marriages of the descendants of Mayer Amschel Rothschild were with first cousins, and the marriage of his youngest son to his niece was much commented on at the time. Consanguineous marriages were a prominent trend among the Jewish haute bourgeoisiethroughout the 19th century and into the 20th (W. E. Mosse. The German-Jewish Economic Élite 1820–1935: A Socio-cultural Profile. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1989, 161ff). The fact that such marriages have declined among Jews in Western societies does indicate that assimilation to individualist norms may occur over time.

It is something of a conundrum why Jews were able to maintain a very competent, high-IQ elite despite the tendency toward consanguinity. One might speculate that for Jews consanguinity did not occur at the same levels as is common in the Muslim world. Wealth and social status of marriage partners mattered greatly. During their ascendancy, the Rothschilds sought advantageous marriages with other wealthy Jewish families, only pursuing consanguinity after they had become the wealthiest family in Europe. Further, consanguinity co-occurred with eugenic practices for high intelligence and for a family history free of mental and physical disorders. (The ancestry of prospective marriage partners was a very serious matter.) For example, wealthy families were encouraged to marry their daughters to scholars. Such marriages would not only be eugenic for IQ but would also be exogamous. Thus the natural tendency toward consanguinity so apparent throughout the Middle East was considerably blunted among Jews.