Causality of incest: A reply to ten Kate

摘要

In a 2010 case report describing the 20-year-old offspring of father-daughter incest who suffered livelong psychomotor health problems, Schmidtke and Krawczak 1 exemplified the quantification of the causality probability pertinent to such cases. Their study was motivated by the fact that had the incest been causal with probability >50 , then the patient would have been entitled to compensation under the German Victim Indemnification Act ("Opferentschadigungsgesetz"). Schmidtke and Krawczak 1 argued that the incest was "causative" of the disease at least if the patient was autozygous for one or more mutations that, in the homozygous state, led to her disease. Such "causal autozygosity" is a sufficient although not a necessary condition for causality of the incest, so that the probability of the former represents a lower limit to the latter.