Posted on 04/23/2009 3:32:46 AM PDT by Loyalist
Periodically I see someone wanting to allow first cousin marriages, pointing out the genetic risk from doing it, once, is small. As this illustrates the risk is that allowing it once also allows the potential for it happening repeatedly. Like compounded interest, that risk then becomes large. Genetic diseases are much more common in societies where such is allowed and the families involved often believe the practice is a good thing, keeping money and power within the family.
Queen Mary I (daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon) married her first cousin, Philip II of Spain. They had no children.
Lately, some studies have showed that close marriages do not have this kind of effect unless there is a known genetic defect that gets carried forward through the marriages. I’m from the south and many of my ancestors married first cousins. One ancestor born about 1720 shows up in four of my lines. Three of my father’s grandparents were cousins to each other, one couple being first cousins. Most people in my father’s family live into their 90s and are relatively healthy.
A girl dreaming of a being swept off her feet by a prince on a white horse would be safer, genetically speaking, marrying the horse.
There is really nothing wrong with inbreeding. You just have to start with good stock, kill the worst third and don’t over do it, ie new blood with some frequency.
It is how you fix desired characteristics in a bloodline.
Just Rio Arriba County.
Interesting article!
I knew this was going to be about the Habsburgs before I even clicked on it.
LMAO!
Well, with patience and intelligence you can turn wolves into Golden Retrievers, but it's never been done with humans. That free will thing always getting in the way...
I am certain that if any random set of first cousins was to have offspring the probability would be that nothing would go wrong. However, let their offspring also marry first cousins, and those offspring marry first cousins, and sooner or later you arrive at a point where the offspring have serious issues FAR more often than not (even when the initial pair of first cousins did not have any obvious genetic defects whatsoever).
In royal families (and certain cultures, for instance certain communities in India and Pakistan), the 'rinse and repeat' process over a couple of generations leads to a situation where the nth generation is significantly weaker.
There's an interesting study I once did in my native Kenya ....using my own family, I looked at how things were just before the beginning of the 20th century (while records are shaky, I was blessed with having a grandma who lived until 2007, and she was just over a hundred years ...give or take ...based on the government documents she had from the colonial period. Thus, I had a person that, even at that age, was of sound mind ....another topic I did a study on, which is the type of diet then and now ....and I could basically study the rest of the family from her all the way to me). Basically, each successive generation was significantly taller (significantly), and with the advent of motor cars marriages started to occur further and further afield (by the time I came to be, my mother had 3 tribes in her, and my father 2). The first generation in my study look quite similar ....by the time you come to my generation (e.g me, my cousins etc) we look extremely different ....an inside joke in the family is that the only race we don't have is aboriginee, since we have every mix from Caucasian to S.E. Asian.
The height can obviously be a by-product of higher calorific (NOT better ...just more calories) diet. I say not better because if you look on average, the older generation simply did not have any degenerative diseases ....no senility (as stated the only issue with my great grandmother is she got partially blind, but her mental faculties were totally perfect), while if you look at the general younger population things like heart attacks have started to take root. The older gen used to eat mostly roots (e.g. sweet potatoes, arrow roots, cassava) and vegetables with meat (from rather skinny cattle and goats), while the younger gen eats the same diet as a kid from Brooklyn and slurps it down with the same shakes and malts (obviously I am talking about higher income Kenya, not 'Discovery Channel' Kenya that most people who assume Africa is totally homogenous see as a baked-in archetype).
However, each successive generation has been quite different from the one before, and significantly so. Add exponentially better education, and there is no comparison.
I am sure if it was all limited to marrying within a 50 mile radius, even with access to food with higher calorific content (or even a mix of higher calories and better nutrition, which is not the same thing) and better education, it would not be the same as it is now in our family.
They needed a study for that? Geez all you had to do is take one look at Prince Charles.
Not to mention the convenience factor. For example, if you have a shortfall in the royal treasury and an alliance with your rich neighbor would be good for business, and they just happen to have an ugly daughter who'd be great standing next to your ugly son...
And then, of course, there's poor specimens in the cradles.
Or in the case of the "sterile" king, maybe he's just so unappealing, even his queen won't go near him.
And then there's the likes of Bela, a king of Hungary who was enjoying life too much to settle down; he refused to wed and the line went dead.
Just saying. {g}
Thank you. Very, very interesting. I just know that my family has married cousins for many generations, many times first cousins. Even now, with cars and education, it’s not unusual to see cousins married, although not first cousins... they are far more distant now. Well, this was true up until about 1950 or so. Not so much now. As our family migrated west (we started out in Virginia) families traveled and married together. So you can see families intermarried in, say, Texas, in the 1950s in family groups that started migrating together over a hundred years before. It’s interesting that my father’s line is short and I know from reading military descriptions of ancestors and their brothers that that has not always been so, but I don’t know if that’s because of the height of the “outsider families” they married into. And my father died younger than his brothers—84. We expected him to live another 10 years based on family history, although there was a reason we learned later. It just seems that we had good genes and did not pick up defects along the way.
I envy you having the opportunity to know your grandmother who was over 100. Mine lived to 80 and I was not interested in genealogy at the time. I’d love to ask her a lot of questions now. Thanks about the information on Kenya. Your post reminds me of why I have stayed with FR these many years.
FReeping from a cell phone, perhaps? “FRexting”?
Queen Anne’s sister, Mary II, had no children also.
My understanding is that many Arab countries have unusually high rates of birth defects due to inbreeding. IIRC, some of the countries are trying to discourage consanguinous marriages for that reason.
Isnt that the truth? Tierra Amarilla has single helix DNA. The family tree up there only has one branch. When we were working over there, it was just scary seeing those people.
That’s what I’ve heard too. Arabs were, according to some older source of mine (either the Britannicas or the Brainiac here), known to be one of the “purest” genetic populations remaining on earth.
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