Take “cousins” to mean first cousins with unrelated, outbred founders and unrelated spouses in the intervening generation. Interpret a homozygous chromosome as two copies identical by descent, and first use an idealization of independent, nonrecombining chromosome blocks. Ordinary sequence homozygosity is a different quantity: unrelated copies can have the same allele, so its probability also requires allele frequencies. Similarly, identity of an entire recombining chromosome requires a genetic map, not just a pedigree.
At a single autosomal locus, the probability of autozygosity in their child is the parents' kinship coefficient. Each of the two common grandparents contributes a path of length two from each parent, with probability . Thus the first-cousin inbreeding coefficient is
If there are independent autosomal blocks, the probability that none is autozygous is . Hence the usual 23-block idealization gives
The exponent describes the stated independent-block approximation; it is not a claim that all 23 human chromosome pairs inherit like autosomes.
Humans have 22 autosomal pairs. A son has one X and one Y and cannot have two homologous X copies. A daughter can have an autozygous X, with probability determined by the sex-linked cousin kinship calculation in part (b). Thus a sex-aware version is
where is the probability of a daughter, or is one or zero for a specified daughter's or son's sex. The independent assortment approximation applies between the autosomes and the X. Opposite-sex parentage alone does not determine : the parents may be cousins through their mothers, their fathers or one of each. Without these pedigree and chromosome-block assumptions, the wording does not specify a unique probability of an entire homozygous human chromosome.
Use the conventional additive pedigree relatedness , where is the kinship coefficient, the probability that randomly selected gene copies from and are identical by descent. For noninbred individuals this convention gives ordinary full siblings relatedness , as required. It is important that this is not the probability of sharing at least one copy: that probability is for ordinary full siblings.
Let the parents be . They are otherwise outbred first cousins, so and . For two children , independent Mendelian segregation gives
Therefore the autosomal additive relatedness is
The additional beyond comes from maternal-paternal cross-origin matches. Each child has inbreeding coefficient . The additive coefficient is a sum of descent probabilities rather than a literal bounded probability in all inbred pedigrees; a relationship normalized to self-relatedness would be . Likewise, identity-by-descent sharing of inbred full siblings gives a different matched-copy statistic. The exam's calibration to supports the additive convention, but the quoted probability wording needs this qualification.
For sex chromosomes the route of cousinship matters, not merely the fact that the parents have opposite sex. Let be the mother-cousin's parent in the shared sibling pair, and the father-cousin's parent in that pair. Let be the probability that the mother's randomly transmitted X matches the father's single X by descent. With no founder inbreeding, the possibilities are
In the first two rows the father-cousin is related through his father, whose X he does not inherit. In the third row his mother is a sister of the mother-cousin's father: the relevant brother and sister match their maternal X copies with probability , and the mother-cousin transmits her paternal X with probability , giving . In the last row the two sisters' random X gametes match with probability : their common father's X contributes , and their common mother's two X copies contribute . Transmission by the mother-cousin halves this to . This derives the sex-linked cousin kinship values.
For an unweighted comparison by chromosome pair, two daughters have sex-pair additive relatedness : their paternal X always matches, maternal X matches with probability , and the two cross-origin terms each contribute . Two sons have mean sex-pair relatedness , from an X match of probability and a common paternal Y with probability one. A daughter-son pair has sex-pair value , with the Y contribution zero. These calculations treat chromosomes as unrecombined blocks and weight X and Y equally; chromosome-length-weighted or locus-specific coefficients are different.
For two children with independent equally likely sexes, these three cases have weights . Their mean sex-pair relatedness is , so averaging the 22 autosomal pairs and the sex pair gives
If the cousins' route has , this is , slightly below . If, as an additional sampling assumption, the four parent-sex routes in the table are equally likely, and the answer is . These are different legitimate numerical corrections under different specified pedigrees. There is no unique sex-chromosome correction from opposite-sex cousinhood alone. The table and formula give it once the missing pedigree and offspring-sex information is supplied.