And the problem here is that with consanguinous marriages, marriages between related families, related royal families, you not only reinforce political power, but also this inbreeding over the generations creates a reduction in genetic variability, genetic diversity, one generation going It consolidates political power, but also defective genes.
It seems quite clear that he was congenitally incapable of fathering a child. So after generations of inbreeding and that mounting genetic burden, the entire dynasty effectively collapsed. They strategically married themselves into extinction.
between uncle and niece. And so the degree of inbreeding increased tenfold over the two centuries leading up to Charles II. Now, the most conspicuous aspect of that consanguinous marriages, those inbreeding within the Spanish Habsburgs,
association so it was pretty stunning. They didn't know what to make of it. They thought at first that maybe there was something protective about being in the upper classes, maybe there was some genetic inbreeding that maybe protected you if you were part of the aristocracy or the elite, that didn't hold water for very long. So what they were left with was the idea that maybe status in and of itself was the correlation, maybe status was the driver towards good or bad health. They distilled it to this idea
One long, giant lung and one smaller lung. So sometimes what you see in a bottleneck of population is inbreeding concerns.
desperate so imagine two hundred dollars a year coming in I think their average donation is twenty-five dollars so you all the the tables and turns out probably because of inbreeding but the royalty is has a shortest lifespan and
going to his great great great great grandson Charles II, we see that increasingly pronounced Habsburg jaw which can be demonstrated to be due to that increasing levels of inbreeding down the generations. But there are even more severe consequences for the Habsburgs of that inbreeding.
which can be demonstrated to be due to that increasing levels of inbreeding down the generations. But there are even more severe consequences for the Habsburgs of that inbreeding. And the dynasty suffered increasingly from epilepsy and other mental health issues, as well as strings of miscarriages and stillbirths.
And he said, your grandfather, he told me. But I couldn't do what my parents did, because I am way too disabled to inbreed . And I couldn't go on match.com, because typing is not my thing.
And so the degree of inbreeding increased tenfold over the two centuries leading up to Charles II. Now, the most conspicuous aspect of that consanguinous marriages, those inbreeding within the Spanish Habsburgs, was in their face.
And there were three different groups of scientist trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. And 9,000 ferrets later, through this captive breeding project that they have ongoing, they're beginning to show signs of inbreeding.
So what we did is we just kind of did a shotgun approach to see what kind of vomeronasal receptor genes were present in lemurs, and particularly mouse lemurs. And amazingly, in this tiny, little forest patch, you would expect that it would be monotypic genetically, because you would think inbreeding,