An Estimate of the Mutational Damage in Man From Data on Consanguineous Marriages

6 Here and later we are making the simplifying assumption that a pre-existing mutant allele has the same effect on viability as the new mutant.This is justified as a first approximation by the observation that compounds of mutants are often near the average of the mutant homozygotes.'his formula is given for only two alleles, but the extension to a larger number is obvious and the linearity in F remains.In applying this to a real population, we assume F = 0 for all individuals not known to come from a consanguineous marriage.