Most Notable Royal Inbreeding Throughout History and the Craziness that Ensued

[Judi Lynn]

By Staff Reporter Nov 28, 2019 07:09 AM EST

A recent study claimed that inbreeding might have caused the extinction of the Neanderthals.

Due to the demographic problems, specifically small population, ancient people had practiced creating procreation even to the closely related individuals in the hope of salvaging the diminishing number. However, it backfired as the newer generation suffered from multiple disabilities, including lower reproductive fitness. This caused the death of the Neanderthals.

It is no secret that this practice of incestuous reproduction is generally unaccepted in modern social norms, especially with the current age of information when people can easily research on its negative effect. Unfortunately, our ancestors are unaware of it.

Below is the list of notable cases of crazy disabilities and illnesses caused by series of inbreeding.

More:
https://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/42758/20191128/royal-inbreeding-throughout-history.htm

[wnylib]

2. There.are some common misunderstandings.in this proposition

about inbreeding and in the link provided.

Inbreeding does not cause mutations. It only passes along already existing ones. The chances of inheriting a negative or positive trait increase with inbreeding because the same genes keep getting passed on to the next generations if both parents carry the same genes because they come from the same ancestors.. Recessive gene traits are the most affected by inbreeding because the chances increase for the children to inherit one recessive gene from each parent.

Regarding hemophilia, Queen Victoria did not have it. She was a carrier if it. It is a sex-linked disorder, carried on the X chromosome. Since women have 2 X chromosomes, they have a chance of inheriting a normal blood clotting gene with one of their X chromosomes, even if they get the hemophilia gene from one of their parents. But men have only one X chromosome, so if they get a hemophilia gene from a parent they will have the disorder. Therefore it is rare for women to have the disorder. Usually they are carriers while the men in their family, especially their male descendants, will be hemophiliacs.

Queen Victoria had a large family. Some of her children married into royal families that were not related, or at least were distantly related, but they passed the gene on to their descendants.

Inbreeding in the past occurred smong common people, too, especially peasants. They lived in small villages with limited choices in marriage partners since they did not travel much except.in times of war. After a few generations, most.people in a region were at least distantly related to each other. That is why certain traits are associated with certain areas.

It happened among middle classes, too, often in order to keep property within a family because the eldest usually inherited the property. If a man who inherited his father's land and.business.married a female cousin, he received a dowery from her and.both families had a stske in the property.

I do not believe that Neanderthals made a conscious decision to mate with their relatives in an attempt to preserve their species. I think they simply mated with who was available and their chouces were limited due to small numbers. I also do not believe that Inbreeding.caused their extinction. There are many possible causes for it -- climate change as glaciers melted, larger numbers of homo sapiens crowding them out, possible diseases carried by homo sapiens, wars with homo sapiens, etc. We know that some of them mated outside of their families to homo sapiens.

Most people alive today have some inbreeding in their family tree somewhere, generally (we hope) in the distant past.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. There really are problems with that article.

If Prince Albert had been a "carrier" of hemophilia, he would have had the disease. I don't believe it's possible for a man to be an asymptomatic carrier.

The consensus is that Queen Victoria had the misfortune to have had a mutation on one of her X chromosomes, all on her own. It started with her. There is absolutely no evidence that any of her ancestors had it.

As wnylib has noted, the article leads you to believe that inbreeding somehow causes diseases and mental illness. It doesn't. It just greatly increases the concentration of recessive genes in the population, allowing for a greatly expanded expression of those genes. Various groups like the Amish have that problem, because they almost never marry outside their own small communities, and certain rare diseases are astonishingly common.

[Boomer]

4. The science research behind this pop science artice is worth a read

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225117

"Our results indicate that the disappearance of Neanderthals might have resided in the smallness of their population(s) alone: even if they had been identical to modern humans in their cognitive, social and cultural traits, and even in the absence of inter-specific competition, Neanderthals faced a considerable risk of extinction. Furthermore, we suggest that if modern humans contributed to the demise of Neanderthals, that contribution might have had nothing to do with resource competition, but rather with how the incoming populations geographically restructured the resident populations, in a way that reinforced Allee effects, and the effects of inbreeding and stochasticity."