Thursday, April 18, 2013

Icelandic and Afraid You're Going to Have Sex with Your Cousin?

From Improbable Research:
Genetics: App for Icelanders who are apt to sleep with relatives
The News of Iceland web site reports:
New App Prevents Icelanders from Sleeping With their Relatives
The Icelandic population is very small and all Icelanders are related. But yet, it is big enough so everyone doesn’t know one another. This means that each and every Icelander that is in a relationship, is dating a relative. In most cases those relations are distant. But not always. But how can they know? …
Three engineers made an app for the ‘Íslendingabók’ database. People can now easily, and on the go, look up how they are related to other Icelanders. And a precious feature, using the bump technology, allows people that meet to just bump their phones together, to instantly see if they are too related to take things any further. The engineers’ slogan for this feature was: “Bump the app before you bump in bed”.
The database is online. The app is available from several sites.
(Thanks to investigator Geoffrey Miller for bringing this to our attention.)