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[jimbobobby]

Hey guys, I just thought about sharing this with you.

The child of his parent is the child of his sibling yet he has no shame in admitting this to the only man who he cannot trust, what must be done to this fool? Also, if I murder him then kill his nephew/cousin I'm still a good person so don't try telling me Armok won't be proud!

[ObeseHelmet]

Too bad the guy wasn't named "Sensualincest" or "Virginlust" or something.

[acetech09]

Check legends on that guy. See if he ... got busy.

[NW_Kohaku]

The child of his parent is the child of his sibling yet he has no shame in admitting this to the only man who he cannot trust, what must be done to this fool? Also, if I murder him then kill his nephew/cousin I'm still a good person so don't try telling me Armok won't be proud!

For starters, the child of his parent would be his brother or sister, not his cousin. 

Furthermore, "cousin" is a rather loosely-defined term, as a cousin five times removed may have almost no genetic relation to you at all, but still be considered a "cousin".

Finally, he may be a cousin of this character through his paternal side, and a nephew through his maternal side, and as such, there may be no relation between these two things, except by marriage.  (As in, when two families have multiple relatives that marry into the same two families.)

[Owlbread]

If it is possible to become your own grandfather, it must be possible for your nephew to be your cousin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlzSRQ8C0uQ&feature=fvst

[jimbobobby]

If it is possible to become your own grandfather, it must be possible for your nephew to be your cousin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlzSRQ8C0uQ&feature=fvst

That had made too much sense to me, more sense than looking both ways before crossing the road.

[MadocComadrin]

Possible non-incest scenario: He's married. His wife's sister/brother married his uncle/aunt (respectively) and they had a child.

[Courtesy Arloban]

I had a follower who was married to her nephew, and her name had three references to virgin in it.  Also she was a member of the group that formed the civ, also with a reference to virginity in the name.  Contrast my adventurer's name Roku Gripmolten the Carnal Mirrors randomly generated with a title gained from outlaws.

Point being that yes, NPC's do marry family members, also she was 20, and her nephew was 13, and I accidently turned him into a girl with runesmith for a while, so the first notice I had she was married to him was when she told me she was married to her "niece".

[trees]

A relevant thing from DF Talk 4 that, as far as I know, is still valid:

Toady:   ...the game avoids certain inbreeding; you should never have brothers with brothers - I'm sorry, that's not even going to lead to a long line - I meant brothers and sisters, and half-brothers and half-sisters. It should avoid those, it should avoid parents and children, but I think certain things ... the farther out on the graph you search the longer it takes to find things ... but I haven't really made my best effort there, because I think uncles and aunts are still okay, and cousins it doesn't check for. Cousins, they have a lot more historical basis, so they're actually fine, essentially, but aunts and uncles I don't think have quite as much ...
Rainseeker:   So a niece could marry an uncle?
Toady:   This is the current setup, yeah.

[NW_Kohaku]

There's also the fact that I think civs are started with only about 10 males and 10 females per site placed at the start of the game, or something...

Anyway, regardless, with enough time going on, everyone gets traced back to some sort of relatives somewhere up the family tree, so you have to be marrying a cousin of some-odd degree at some point.

[Dutchling]

I mapped a civ's population once, starting with the king and than added ~200 more Dwarves who were either his descendants or family of the spouses of his descendants.

I had the grand-grand-daughter of the king marry his youngest son. The only thing Dwarves will check is age (they almost always marry someone close to their age) and whether or not the potential spouse is sibling/parent and perhaps uncle/aunt. In reality a 1000 years world would be filled with cripples and albino's.

[Kilroy the Grand]

It depends on how large of a starting population they have, I believe a stable population would need around 500 individuals, less with the proper optimization. Since dwarves instinctively know if they are closely related inbreeding shouldn't become an issue .

[Starver]

[Not a reply to the message(s) immediately above, especially the non-ninjaing ninja-like one that's just popped up.  Just making a general comment.]

Bear in mind that if you very strictly wish both parents to be previously unrelated, and thus all four grandparents to be previously unrelated, and thus all eight great-grandparents to be previously unrelated, and thus...

Well, eventually you're going to have some relations, once you're far enough past DF's "year zero" creation of separate individuals and have had a number of generations of pairing-off.  The only non-relations you're going to be getting, eventually, are those who would never (by dint of racial or geographic separation) would never get to hook-up in the first place.

And cousins, as has been mentioned, covers every common-ancestry relationship not already covered by the more immediate terminology, where there is at least one distinct generation between the shared root and each individuals sitting at the end of their respective family-tree branches.  (With "Nth cousin, M times removed" nomenclature, as necessary.)

Frexample: Obama's famous eighth cousin in Ireland, and Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh who are both 10th cousins.  'Dubya' himself is an 11th cousin of Obama.  My cursory searches don't reveal any "removed" value for any of these.  But I did find that Obama and Warren Buffet are apparently a mere 7th cousins, three times removed.

I, myself, have a 'proper' cousin (1st cousin, no times removed) who by dint of the efforts (or otherwise) of the respective siblings in the previous generation, in raising their families at different speeds, is significantly older than me.  In fact his son (a once-removed cousin of mine) is near-as-makes-no-difference the same age as me.    (I think I described that correctly... I'm sure someone will pick me up if I've erred in some way. )  And I see no reason why any of my descendants (after another generation or two) couldn't 'mix it' with descendants of that branch.  Given my side of the family's own tardiness in procreation that side is already full two generations ahead of my side!  (This also means that there'd be a lot of unrelated DNA in their mix by that time that would make in-breeding effectively non-existent, even if my side still retains an 'excessive' 8th/16th/32nd part of the common ancestry's genetics that might have clashed with that side's 'hand-me-down' genomes.)


I'm also tempted to link to the "All You Zombies" tale, just for the interesting family tree pretzel-loop.

[NW_Kohaku]

I mapped a civ's population once, starting with the king and than added ~200 more Dwarves who were either his descendants or family of the spouses of his descendants.

I had the grand-grand-daughter of the king marry his youngest son. The only thing Dwarves will check is age (they almost always marry someone close to their age) and whether or not the potential spouse is sibling/parent and perhaps uncle/aunt. In reality a 1000 years world would be filled with cripples and albino's.

That's not really how inbreeding works.

Keep in mind that throughout human history, before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, almost all of humanity lived in villages that were no larger than a few hundred individuals, with very few people ever leaving to find a new village, whether they were hunter-gatherer nomads or settled farming villages.  Almost everyone was a third- or fourth-cousin to everyone else in their village.

We humans have basically the capacity to remember only around 150 faces and have relationships of any meaning with that many people and that's basically the size of the village that has been where almost all humans that have ever lived have congregated until the 1800s.  It's the modern notion of communications and cities where one can be annonymous and in contact with people who you aren't genetically related to that is the anomaly. 

So, basically, if marrying your third cousin will inevitably lead to cripples and albinos after a mere thousand years, then guess what the entirety of humanity has been doing for hundreds of thousands of years?

[Starver]

I didn't see this the first time round, for some reason.  (Probably blanked it out because of the apostrophe abuse. )

In reality a 1000 years world would be filled with cripples and albino's.

As NW_Kohaku said, that's not how it works.  But he didn't go into the reasons so far as I can see.

With a population that's become merely sibling offspring being co-parents to further sibling offspring who continue the tradition, and very little else for multiple generations, the bad/undesirable recessive genes (either introduced by a 'starter ancester' carrier, or mutating into the gene-pool at some point) come to the fore in ways that they would never do with even even a small population with a "close incest" ban.  In the latter case, the recessives may still exist but be squashed by healthy dominant genes and get a chance to drop out altogether.

Though if recessive-recessive pairings ever do occur (to a non-fatal degree), in a village, the physical/mental deformities that manifest themselves send potential mates scurrying instead to the other opportunities for family relations, rather than taking the "village idiot/cripple" as the 'choice' partner.  And the union of two fellow VI/Cs, or borderline examples, is less significant with plenty of other carrier-at-worst couplings to create the 'true' next generation.  And thus the 'loaded dice' of bad genetics that these individuals represent gets quietly dropped out of the local 'breeding program'.

Which is a simplified explanation, of course.