On October 7, 1649, the King of Spain, one Philip IV, took a lady’s hand in marriage.
Her name was Maria Anna, later to become Mariana of Austria.
What might perhaps sound unusual or unethical to our modern viewers is the fact there was
a large age-gap in this relationship, with the king being 44 years of age and his new
wife being a mere girl at age 14.
What might perhaps be more surprising is the fact that the bond was between uncle and niece.
How would that go down in 2020?
Well, given the year this has been so far, it’d be the least insane thing to happen
yet.
This pairing belonged to a royal family named the Habsburgs, a dynasty well-known for not
letting the apple fall far from the family tree.
They inbred, and they did it with such enthusiasm that it might be the reason for their empire
coming crumbling down.
Habsburg inbreeding was so remarkable in fact, that you could say it created monsters of
children.
Mariana and Philip’s son was living proof, a man that was arguably the most deformed
inbred person in the circles of European royalty.
Today you are going to hear some of the worst inbreeding stories in history, and you are
also going to hear some crazy stories about the inbreeders of recent times.
You will learn who did it, why they did it, and why it wasn’t such a good idea.
But let’s stay with Philip and Mariana for now, because we’re certain you want to know
how that ended.
What you have to understand is that the Habsburg family tree looks more like a stump.
The same names pop-up again and again, and that’s because they kept things within the
family when it came to procreating.
The purpose of the inbreeding was mostly a matter of keeping the heritage in their own
hands.
What they didn’t know back then was just how bad it was.
You only have to look at the parents of Philip and Mariana…both families had a handful
of children and few survived into adulthood.
As for Philip and Mariana’s kids, only two out of five would make it to adulthood.
One of them named Charles has become one of the most famous kings ever known, and that
wasn’t because of his bravery, or brutishness, but because he was a near-monstrosity of a
child…a person so malformed that he got the nickname, “The Bewitched.”
As you’ll see in this show, he’s not the worst example of inbreeding, but he’s certainly
up there.
Because Charles was the product of uncle and niece he not only became their son, but he
also became their great-nephew and first cousin.
The strange thing is, and something we’ll get around to explaining, is that Charles’
sister, Margaret, didn’t suffer the same plight as he did.
Ok, so she had a long list of living child births and miscarriages, and she died at just
21 from ill-health, but compared to Charles she lived a fairly healthy life.
Poor Charles was doomed from the start…the kid was born with such an elongated jaw that
he couldn’t speak until the age of four.
Even when he was up and running in the talking department he still found it difficult to
speak, all because of this oversized jaw – what’s become known as the Habsburg jaw...
Charles wasn’t the only Habsburg to be afflicted with it.
During his first few years he had about every childhood disease possible, including smallpox,
chicken pox, measles, and rubella, and each of those back then could have killed him.
He spent much of childhood in a sickly state, so much so that Mariana barely let him out
of her sight.
Nonetheless, the child became a man, a man that walked badly and drooled a lot, and a
man that was said to live in a constant state of debilitating depression.
His mood might not have been lifted by the fact that people chatted behind his back,
saying he was so ugly he was hard to look at.
He didn’t have children himself, although it wasn’t for trying.
Some historians speculate that he wasn’t able to procreate due to his being inbred,
and as you’ll find out, that’s not unusual in the world of relative relationships.
He grew up, but suffered so much from illness that people were surprised he made it to 30.
In fact, one historian wrote that he was, “short, lame, epileptic, senile and completely
bald before 35, always on the verge of death but repeatedly baffling Christendom by continuing
to live.”
In the year 1700, he became ill…again…and just before his 39th birthday he dropped down
dead.
The autopsy report read that on examination, his corpse, “did not contain a single drop
of blood; his heart was the size of a peppercorn; his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten
and gangrenous; he had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water.”
It was a miracle he lived as long as he did.
Royal inbreeding happened all over Europe…it happened all over the world in fact.
In Asia, it occurred in Japan, Korea, China, and it happened quite spectacularly in Thailand.
We say that because in the 19th and late 20th century a king there, named Chulalongkorn,
got it on with so many people it’s mind-boggling.
It wasn’t that unusual, given that his pop had 82 children with various women.
That father had 32 wives and “concubines” – meaning a kind of lesser partner,not a
spouse – but the son Chulalongkorn would beat that.
If you count his wives plus his other named partners, Chulalongkorn was involved with
a total of 116 people, but what’s perhaps even stranger is his four wives were all his
half-sisters.
You heard that right...he got hitched and had children with his father’s own girls.
With those sister-wives, as well as with his consorts and concubines, he would have 77
of his own kids.
The difference between a consort and concubine, by the way, is that a consort is more like
a minor wife, not just a partner.
Let’s now see what happened to some of those kids that he had with his half-sisters.
Well, there was Princess Deb Nariratana.
She was ill all her life and died aged eight.
Her brother, Prince Tribejrutama Dhamrong, died at six.
Then there was Prince Siriraj Kakudhabhand, dead at two.
In fact, if you look at his children who actually survived childbirth, many of them died when
they were still kids.
If you look further at his long list of children what you see is a pattern.
The children he had with his sisters for the most part died very young, and the children
he had with his consorts also died young for the most part.
It seems the children that had the best chance of a long life were those he had with his
concubines.
All will be explained shortly as to why.
Moving away from royalty, most of you we’re sure have heard of the British scientist Charles
Darwin.
When he wasn’t writing about evolution he was with his beloved wife, Emma Darwin, formerly
Emma Wedgewood...Charles’ first cousin.
Prior to the marriage, Charles had no scruples about getting involved with his cousin.
What concerned him more was the loss of his free time that marriage would cost him, and
also the fact he’d have less cash to buy books.
Nonetheless, they tied the knot and went on to have ten kids.
The problem was, some of those kids would not live very long.
His second child, Anne, died just aged ten after contracting the disease scarlet fever.
His son, Charles, died in infancy, and another girl died after only two weeks.
Something that plagued Darwin was not only that he lost some kids early on in their life,
but the fact many of his children that grew up suffered from all kinds of life-threatening
and strange illnesses.
It was as if they had been born weak, or in his own words when he spoke of his kids, “They
are not very robust.”
Three of those that did live a long time didn’t have any children of their own, and it’s
now speculated that the fact that they were the result of inbreeding could have led to
their inability to procreate.
Darwin once said in a moment of sadness, “We are a wretched family and ought to be exterminated”.
At one point he wrote that one of his boys had injured kidneys and very swollen glands
in his neck, while another boy he said was consumed by “hysterical sobbing” and “semi-convulsive
movements.”
What was happening to his children, he wondered, and then he began to think that it was somehow
his fault for the decision he had made to marry his cousin.
You see, he noticed that cross-bred plants were generally healthier than self-fertilised
plants.
Maybe marrying cousins, he pondered, wasn’t such a great idea.
At the time the scientific community could only speculate that consanguineous marriage,
meaning a marriage between people who are closely related, could result in things like
deafness, or blindness, but what if it could result in children being very sickly, or even
dying young?
Darwin actually asked the government to try and collect data on this, but it didn’t
happen in his lifetime.
What he didn’t know was that bacterial infections are linked to inbreeding, and that’s how
two of his children died.
You should know this, too, Darwin's maternal grandparents were also related, and as you’ll
soon see, that very likely mattered.
These days 31 states in the U.S. ban marriage between first cousins as do a handful of countries.
So we should now ask, is there such a big risk if you marry your first cousin?
That answer depends on who you are talking to, and that’s because while first cousins
only share as many as 12.5 percent of their gene, some experts think there’s only a
very small risk that first-cousin offspring will be born sickly.
Ok, but what about those people who procreate with their half sibling, or those that go
the whole hog and have a child with their full sibling?
Well, we share about 25 percent of our genes with a half sibling and about 50 percent with
a full sibling.
With an uncle and niece or aunt and nephew, 25 percent of the genes are shared.
What could go wrong, especially if babies are born to a biological brother and sister?
It does sometimes happen, and we call this sibling incest, like in this tragic story.
A German man named Patrick Stübing was adopted at a young age after his drunken father tried
to stab him with a knife.
When he was 23 years old, he discovered his biological family, including his biological
sister, Susan.
In 2001, their mother died, and while there was sadness, the two siblings really hit it
off…so much so, that they began sleeping together.
To cut a long story short, they had four children named Eric, Sarah, Nancy, and Sofia.
As for Patrick, he was arrested and sent to prison since incest is illegal in Germany…We
should say that legality of incest differs from country to country and is usually not
illegal if the relationship is between two consenting adults.
Moving on.
Susan said she was in love with Patrick and she said after his arrest that she hoped the
law would change.
“I just want to live with my family, and be left alone by the authorities and by the
courts,” she said.
That’s all fine and well, but this is not a show about the ethics of incest.
What we want to know is how are those children doing?
Well, when Patrick was asked about his children’s welfare, he admitted that the kids were struggling.
One had epilepsy and learning difficulties…another also had learning difficulties…one had to
have a heart transplant in infancy because of a heart defect…and one of them is fine.
That one, Sofia, is the only child that still lives with her parents, or she did so, when
she was last talked about in the media.
The others all had to go into care.
So, that’s a lesson for all you people thinking about getting into a relationship with your
brother or sister.
The risk is high that the children you have could be disabled or prone to having a disease.
The risk of having a disabled or very ill child with your cousin is thought to only
be about two or three percent higher than it would if you have children with someone
not related to you at all, but as you’ve seen today, if this inbreeding goes on for
generations it can lead to many ills.
Ok, so now you want to know why this happens.
Let’s get scientific.
You see, you are a product of your mom and pop.
You have two copies of each gene, well, most of them, and one copy comes from your father
and one from your mother.
But what if one copy of the gene is faulty?
It doesn’t usually matter, because you’ll have the working copy from the other parent.
If both copies are bad though because you’re too closely related... if both are what are
called faulty recessive genes, then that child could be born with an autosomal recessive
condition.
These are rare, since it’s unlikely that parents carry the same faulty gene.
If they do, whether related or not, it doesn’t always mean the child will be born with the
disease, it just means there is a chance he will.
That’s why some siblings that are born inbred are very sickly and die young, while others
are perfectly healthy.
It’s a bit of a lottery, but the good news is that a doctor interviewed on the matter
said it’s “vanishingly unlikely” that unrelated lovers will carry the same faulty
genes.
It can happen, but it doesn’t happen much.
So, that’s the problem with inbreeding.
Cousin-cousin and you should be ok, but the odds start climbing when you get to aunt-nephew,
and especially brother and sister, or even brother and half-sister.
If your family, like Darwin’s, or worse, the Habsburgs, have been doing the cousin-cousin,
uncle-niece thing for generations, there could well be a prevalence of the same disease or
condition.
If generations of a certain culture of people have been drinking at quite a small gene pool,
then you can get various diseases and conditions turning up more frequently than in other cultures.
Take for instance the preponderance of hemophilia in European royalty, or babies being born
with an extra finger or toe in an isolated Amish community.
A good example, if not horrific and very unusual, was inbreeding at a remote farming community
in Australia that had gone on for a long time.
The authorities found these people just a few years ago, and many of the children were
deformed because they’d inherited the same faulty genes.
Some were deaf, others were blind, and most could hardly speak intelligibly or understand
the cops that found them.
We can’t tell you the name of the valley where they lived or the real family name,
because the media didn’t release that information.
We can say that the community started in the 1970s with two New Zealand immigrants that
the press called Tim and June.
When the cops arrived in 2012, there were forty of them, all originating from that first
couple.
This was a really severe case of inbreeding, and what it resulted in was those children
certainly lived in no Eden.
Our advice is, don’t try and replicate the story of Adam and Eve...you might get blind,
deaf and dumb kids.
Now you need to watch this, “Taboos Around the World.”
Or, have a look at this…