The extent of inbreeding among European royals is somewhat exaggerated. Among English Monarchs, I think only King Edward VII had a high inbreeding coefficient. His parents were 1st cousins (at least according to official pedigrees). Queen Victoria’s mother Victoria of Saxe-Coburg was the sister of Prince Albert’s father, a Duke of Saxe-Coburg.
German high nobles were very restricted in selection of marriage partners, but the pool was, barely, large enough to avoid excessive inbreeding. Three European noble families where on-going inbreeding did sometimes become more severe than the King Edward VII example were Hapsburg, Bourbon, and Rothschild.
Do you mean the Bourbons or the Hapsburg? I’m not particularly fond of quite a few of our Bourbons, but the flagbearer for Inbred Imbeciles would be the last Spanish Hapsburg, if he hadn’t been too stupid to hold it up.
The official pedigree of the Bourbon King Alphonso XII shows inbreeding slightly worse than that of the Hapsburg King Carlos II `el Hechizado.’ Good news is that the official pedigree is widely agreed to be false: Alphonso XII’s natural father was one of his mother’s lovers.
Lending yet more credibility to my notion that inbreeding is blamed for far far more problems than the DNA allows for … no one can look at Prince Charles of England and assume Elizabeth and Phillip were too closely related …
I was thinking specifically of the 19th-century heir apparent that had to be watched carefully during state dinners, lest he climb under the table and start barking and biting the guests’ legs.
The fundamentalist Mormon FLDS community located on the Utah/Arizona border is prone to a very rare genetic disorder called fumerase deficiency - I believe they are the source of most of the known cases in the world.
I’m sorry but I don’t know who do you mean, do you have a name or link? Fernando VII was a whore with my apologies to sex workers, but while he definitely did bite the hand that fed him I haven’t heard anything about him being particularly crazy (narcissistic, insecure and stupid, yes; crazy, no); he had no male heirs that got old enough to attend state dinners; and the only son of Isabel II’s who ever got old enough to attend those was Alfonso XII, a distinct improvement despite all his defects.
This was a 50-year-old memory, and I didn’t get it entirely right. The individual in question was not in the direct line, but was rather the brother of the consort of Isabella II. See the article “1857” in the December, 1969, issue of American Heritage.
Difficult to see such a thing, but hey, I believe you.
Do you happen to have the name? The wiki entry on Francisco de Asis’ mother only lists two other sons who got old enough to attend dinner with the grown-ups; one doesn’t get an entry and doesn’t have the kind of name that’s easy to search for, the other one seems to be pretty normal (reading between the lines, he may have been discarded as a royal consort on account of having more spine than the politicians liked).
I think if you look at the Ptolemies over time they went downhill over the centuries. OTOH Cleopatra VII (the most famous) was pretty smart and capable but with the misfortune that Rome had Octavian at the same time.
Wouldn’t there have been a lot of inbreeding over the centuries at Pitcairn Island, which is populated mainly by descendants of the HMS Bounty mutineers and the Tahitien women they persuaded to sail with them (I don’t think the Tahitien men they brought impregnated any women). There was a sexual assault case involving seven men (one-third of the male population) a few years ago and a declining population but is that due to inbreeding or birth control?
Twenty-seven people sailed on the Bounty to Pitcairn and this could have been enough for adequate genetic diversity. There were soon several murders, for example
and Fletcher Christian himself was killed in 1793, perhaps by Tahitian men who resented the competition for females.
Still, many of the early murderees left descendants to enhance the gene pool. Also, there were new arrivals, for example George Nobbs, a missionary, arrived in 1828. John Buffet preceded him.
Genealogies of the Pitcairn Islanders can be found on-line, including, for example, all 32 of Charles Ephraim John Adams’ (b. 1920) gt-gt-gt grandparents (of whom all but John Buffet’s parents were Pitcairners). Just for fun I may calculate his inbreeding coefficient.
(I don’t know how accurate these genealogies are — certainly we can dismiss the claims that Errol Flynn was grandson of a Pitcairner, or that George Nobbs was the bastard son of an English Marquis.)
Story told before. If you write a paper, do a presentation, whatever, involving protein folding, there is an article by Cyrus Levinthal you Must Cite.
When I was preparing my grad school presentation on protein folding (1995), I did something I’d been taught as an undergrad: I checked all my sources. The article that everybody cited in JACS, in JOC, in any chemistry journal anybody has ever published in, turned out to be about sugar chemistry. Not a protein to be seen. Not a single nitrogen atom.
I managed to track down the paper where Levinthal had “published” the bit that gets cited. The published is between quotation marks because he didn’t write it: it’s the notes a graduate student took of a round table discussion which Levinthal opened with the quotable part. The discussion was about what he pointed out was wrong with then-accepted protein wisdom.
I was given a lowered note for Not Citing The Usual Article and told that I should not dare Correct My Betters. When I pointed out that I’d been taught to check my sources, that the usual article was not the right one, and that I had copies of both documents handy if anybody wished to verify whi- I was interrupted and told that “there is no need to do such a thing as verify everything, young lady, next time just cite the appropriate cite”. I was also informed that notes on a round table are not a quotable source; when I asked why not, since they are a solid enough source that you cannot publish what you presented there as an independent paper, the information I received was that “hrfff!” and that if I didn’t stop questioning my betters I’d be failed for the presentation and need to do a second one.
When C&EN published an interview with Dr. Levinthal a couple of months later where they asked him “how does it feel to be the most-quoted chemist?” and he responded “it would feel better if people gave the right cite!” I could have hugged him flat. That was 20 years ago and there are still people citing the wrong paper.
So, no, I don’t really trust a publication to be correct because it happens to be prestigious.
I don’t think this would baffle an expert genealogist in the least. But that’s sort of a No True Scotsman thing. There is also genealogical software that makes such teasing out child’s play even for strabismic amateurs.
I understand people might claim I’m being uptight, but this is a joke about children raping children.
This is a feature, not a bug. Over-thinking can be counter-productive, but the solution to this inefficiency is not to cease thinking.
In regards to inbred families not in Appalachia, Wikipedia claims significant occurrence of cousin marriage in some Middle East communities, partially attributed to a cultural emphasis on patrilineal descent.
It’s stuff like this that lets the creationists and ID folks point at science and laugh. Comes the (scientific) revolution I hope those pompous bastards are the first against the wall. Correcting your betters (when they’re mistaken) is what it’s all about; otherwise we’d still be citing Aristotle.
To be fair, there are some situations where you really can’t take the time to think. Ideally, you anticipate and prepare for those situations ahead of time, so when they come up you’ve already done all the thinking you need to, but that’s not always possible, and so sometimes the best option available to you really is to act quickly and decisively and hope that you get it right.