Maybe you're a member of European royalty, concerned about keeping
power along family lines. Maybe you just live in Alabama. Either way,
finding out why you can't- and shouldn't- marry your cousin is pretty important.
Today most people feel a sense of disgust at the thought of marrying within one's own family,
and that's for good reason. History has taught us that keeping it all in the family
is pretty much the worst thing you could do as far as future generations are concerned.
Yet for members of royalty throughout history, it was the preferred strategy
for making sure that power and wealth always stayed with the family. The most famous of these
of course would be the infamous Habsburgs, a powerful royal family of German-Austrian
descent who's tangled web of power, and shallow gene pool, stretched across Middle Age Europe.
In a bid to consolidate their hold on the various kingdoms of Europe, the Habsburgs engaged in the
age-old tradition of strategic marriages. The only problem was that after a few centuries so
many Habsburgs were sitting on many thrones, that everyone else was edged out of the gene
pool- lifeguards included. Unwilling to cede any of their vast fortune or political power
to anyone outside of the family, the Habsburgs regularly engaged in marrying within the family,
although the practice was mostly limited to cousins. Still, this proved disastrous and
after several centuries Habsburg family members were riddled with defects and illness. In Spain,
the Habsburg's reign only lasted two centuries after king Charles II died at just 38 years old
with no children- he had been born infertile and lived a sickly life until succumbing to disease.
When like the Habsburgs you ritually use Ancestry.com instead of Tinder to
find your next date, you're bound to end up with some serious birth defects. For Europe's
most prominent royal family, this was most apparent in what was termed the 'Habsburg Jaw',
with individuals having pronouncedly sharp and jutting lower jaws, as well as
Beverly-Hills-golddigger-with-a-midlife-crisis-and-bad-plastic-surgery
style bulbous lips and long noses. Along with those distinctively handsome looks,
the Habsburgs also enjoyed rampant infertility and poor health which directly led to their own
downfall. Their illnesses and deformities were so severe that Charles II was affectionately known as
“El Hechizado”, or “the bewitched”, with peasants believing that surely he had been cursed by some
evil spirit or witch. You could say that Charles enjoyed devilishly good looks- as in he looked
like an actual devil. If the Catholic Church’s inquisitors weren’t busy burning women alive for
wearing pants and doing math, they might have gone after poor Charles based on looks alone.
Today marrying your cousin is illegal in most places around the world, though the law can
differ depending on the familial distance between yourself and a cousin. In the US,
24 states ban marriage between first cousins, while 20 states still allow
it. The rest of the states allow cousin marriage with stipulations- for example,
only if both are over the age of 50, 55, or 65, or if one or both members are infertile.
The point of this government legislation on familial affairs is to limit the genetic harm
passed on to potential offspring, but what exactly are the risks and why do they exist?
DNA is basically the operating system of the human body, no different than Windows for PC
and MacOS for macs- or Linux for you edgelords out there. When you have a bad operating system
though and copy it over to a new machine, you're basically installing the same bugs that one
computer is experiencing into a brand new one. Incest basically does the same thing with DNA.
The point of intermingling our DNA is so that others can make up for the genetic shortfalls
we ourselves have. If for instance you have a defective gene which makes you susceptible to
a specific disease, then your offspring will inherit your bad gene along with a
potentially healthy gene from another partner. Then the healthy gene will help protect your
child from the effects of the disease you yourself are vulnerable to. The same goes
for preventing genetic abnormalities and physical defects- 'good' DNA from a suitable partner can
help make up for your trash Dollar Store DNA, and thus as the child develops good genetic
instructions are copied from your partner's DNA in all the places that your DNA sucks.
Let's help make this a little more visual for you guys though.
One day, Billy brings home Wendy, the hottest girl at the party he was just at. Problem is,
that party was a family reunion. Billy and Wendy fall in love and get married, and soon after
Wendy gets pregnant. As their DNA combines and their child begins to grow into an embryo,
it turns out that both Billy and Wendy have the exact same bad sequence of DNA-
a bit of bad genetic code that makes both Billy and Wendy think that T-mobile is a superior
cellular telephone service provider, when in fact, the entire company is a burning dumpster fire.
With the exact same piece of bad code on both sets of DNA,
Billy and Wendy's child is doomed to inherit that same genetic flaw,
and end up paying for inferior cellular telephone service for the rest of his life.
Let's rewind time a bit though. This time, Billy decides to leave his home state of Alabama
and stop attending family reunions/singles mixers. During his trip abroad, he meets a
new girl- Cindy- and the two quickly fall in love. Shortly after marriage,
Cindy becomes pregnant, and once more two sets of DNA combine in the great miracle of life.
Billy's DNA is garbage, we already know that, but luckily that same genetic sequence that
makes Billy choose the worst cell phone company as his provider, is different for Cindy- instead,
Cindy's healthy DNA realizes that T-mobile is the year 2020 of cell companies. As
Billy and Cindy's child develops, she will inherit healthy genes from her mother, and while she'll
likely still carry Billy's bad DNA, she has much lower risk of passing it on to future generations.
With parents and siblings sharing 50% of DNA, the possibility of passing on bad
genes is significant, and a good reason for not having a crush on your classmates when
you're homeschooled. As you start looking at other branches of the family tree,
the odds improve significantly though. First cousins share only 12.5% of the same DNA.
Second cousins share 6.25% of their DNA and third cousins share just over 3 percent. It's
only when you get to seventh cousins, which is the average familial separation
between American couples, that there's basically no genetic relation anymore.
12.5% though isn't bad odds, so what's so terrible about marrying a cousin? Well,
you could ask any Xcom player who's ever taken a shot with 87.5% chance of success, only to see the
character completely miss said shot, over and over and over again. The problem is that at such levels
of familiarity in the gene pool, cousins could be passing on a 4-7% risk of genetic disease, versus
3-4% for the rest of us. That may not seem like a big deal, but that's just for a single disease,
and there are thousands potential time bombs ticking in your trash-tier DNA. When you roll
the dice that many times, a 3 percentage point spread leads to significantly different results,
and for the kid you had with your cousin, a whole slew of potential diseases or defects.
Today there isn't much risk of marrying a cousin and making your very own Goonies Sloth. Our modern
society affords us a highly mobile lifestyle that presents us with a dizzying array of varying gene
pools. Compare that to the mid 1800s when people were expected to live and die in the same town
they were born in, and ended up marrying someone within a six mile radius of their home. With such
limited opportunities to meet new potential partners, it's no surprise then that marriages
between first cousins were extremely popular for most of human history. For the majority of places
in the world that's a worry of the past, except for Iceland where most of the population lives in
the capital of Reykjavik. There is so much concern over accidentally marrying into your own family
there that the most popular dating app there isn't Tinder, it's Íslendinga-App, which makes
sure that whoever you've got the hots for hasn't been attending the same family reunions you have.
Hey we know we’ve been pretty rough on Alabama this episode, and it’s
all in good humor. Like one of our favorite comedians Jeff Foxworthy said,
you guys train NASA astronauts there after all, they just don’t let you fly any of the rockets…
For more reasons why you should be fishing outside of your own gene pool,
watch When Royal Inbreeding Went Horribly Wrong, or check out this other video instead!