Chapter 23
What encourages inbreeding?
Folk lore would have it that royalty are inbred and useless. If that is true, then the poster child of the condition must be Charles II of Spain, a member of the powerful Habsburg family. We are told that the Habsburgs were very inbred and that Charles II was affected. Here is a link where you can wallow around a while in genealogy and make up your own mind. charles ii habsburg - Bing
He is said to have had chickenpox, measles, rubella and smallpox, but this does not seem odd for such a cosmopolitan place as the Spanish court. He was described as bald, epileptic, lame, senile and short. Charles II of Spain - Wikipedia
So far as I can tell, each of these has been ascribed to inbreeding and each has been hotly contested. At the end of the day, my sense is that royalty elicit such passions for and against that study of them is not likely to be helpful. I am not greatly concerned myself. I believe in freedom, and if people really want a king, well they certainly have the right to one.
Oh, it doesn’t stop with the Habsburgs. Queen Victoria was a carrier for hemophilia. The condition comes about because the clotting system is moderately complex. You get cut and bleed, and eventually the bleeding stops. A number of circulating factors in the blood interact in a way that produces a scab and plugs the leak. The factor in question is named factor VIII. If you have little or no factor VIII, your blood will not clot normally. The gene for factor VIII is on the X chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes while men have an X and a Y.
Now imagine a mutation in the gene for factor VIII that causes the gene to become non-functional and not make that factor. If the non-functional gene is in a woman, there is generally no problem. The other gene for factor VIII will produce enough so that clotting proceeds normally. The woman is unlikely to have two abnormal genes. She may receive one abnormal gene from her mother, but getting one from the father would be problematic. If the father had an abnormal gene for factor VIII, it would have been on his X chromosome. His Y chromosome would not have carried the gene at all, and lacking a backup, he would have had abnormal clotting, hemophilia. Until the past century, that would have meant he was very unlikely to have lived to reproductive age.
The result is that hemophilia has nothing to do with inbreeding. Half of Victoria’s sons, and none of her daughters would have had the disease. She had enough children so that the condition had no great impact on world history. On the other hands, the last czar of Russia was married to a woman who was a carrier. They had a lot of children, but all but one were girls. The only son had the disease. This led to a series of events that led to the rise of the Soviet Union, which supported Red China’s takeover with a result that is of major concern to this day. It was just the flip of the coin. He might have been totally normal.
The fact that inbreeding plays no part has not deterred the royalty-inbred-bad folks. Facts have a regrettably poor record at altering opinion. It is understandable, actually. We like to think our decisions are important; it is hard to swallow the fact that sometimes blind chance determines so much.
I think it’s true that royalty does tend to marry royalty. Maybe there are political motivations. Maybe it’s snobbery. Maybe its to encourage people that royalty are a breed apart, destined by some divine will to wield great power. Maybe it’s to reduce the chances of war; when Charles II died childless, there commenced the War of the Spanish Succession, a tragedy that might have been averted by a more robust king. Maybe there was a spirit of, “We royalty need to stick together.” Your guess is as good as mine.
On the other side of the world, the Japanese emperors were in a family among whom marriage to known kin was moderate. They had the occasional emperor who was a dud, but mostly they managed and survive to this day, tracing ancestry through known history into myth and on back to the gods of their Shinto religion. They have not conspicuously suffered the woes of the Habsburgs nor the czars.
At the other end of the food chain, among the poorest of the poor, the drive toward inbreeding is explicit. Turning to fiction to try to minimize offending particular people, a man named Joseph Conrad wrote a novel, Heart of Darkness. The story is of a few men in a rowboat on the Thames Estuary; one of them spins a yarn about his time in Africa. The passage in question involves a trip by steamboat down the Congo River. At one time the narrator mentions that the fire under the boiler is being stoked by an African man who glances occasionally at the pressure gauge. The fireman’s belief is that if the needle goes past a certain point, the demon inside the machine will arise because of his terrible thirst and destroy the boat and all in it. Conrad was Norwegian and the narrator seemed to find it hard to get into the mind of the fireman.
The trip is not going well, but the narrator says the one thing that did not bother him was the possibility that the crew would simply abandon the unlucky expedition. They assumed that as homeless wanderers they would be put to death by the first tribe they encountered.
Don’t laugh. According to at least one source, there was a rebellion late last century in the country of Sierra Leone. The rebels would recruit members by descending, armed and with the initiative, on a little isolated village. They would then get the fifteen-year-old boys – old enough to fight but probably not old enough to go down fighting in defense of the village – and give them the choice of killing the village elders and joining the rebels or being shot dead on the spot. Enough joinedt he rebels to keep the unrest going.
These youths could not desert and go back home; killing elders of course meant the death penalty. Nor could they desert and move into another village. That meant death, too, just as Conrad had said. Moving into town probably was no more inviting. Each city would be carved up into enclaves among whom all identified with each other and regularly sent anything they made above survival back to a home village. As the fellow said in Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, “A man by himself doesn’t have a XXXX chance.”
Alas is gets worse. By and large of course, I make no excuse for my hideous graphic attempt nor my failure to provide primary sources or often any source at all. I never wanted to do this. I am only putting my body parts in because it is so important, and nobody else is willing to try. Got a problem? Do it right by your own lights; I shall applaud.
This terrible story was told to me by an older friend. I never found him to be in error on anything except that his opinion of health care among the African poor was rather rosier than I thought. Still, he knew and I did not.
At the time of the events, he was in Africa doing volunteer work as a young doctor, a radiologist, as am I. The serenity of the village where he was practicing was shattered when it was discovered that a teenage girl had wandered off unsupervised for something under an hour. The concern, too light a term but comprehensible, was that she had engaged in sex without tribal consent. Most damning, none of the young men in the tribe stepped forward to take responsibility. Of course, most were likely off in the nearest city hustling for coins, and those who remained were working where their work was seen. So, it appeared on the face of it that she had engaged in sex with a man from a different village. She denied it.
They resolved the issue by hiring a witch doctor to come in and get at the truth. He did a superficially harmless little ritual, which I am not about to explain, and then announced that his magic would not harm her if she were innocent. But if she had, in fact, had sex with an outsider, it would kill her. Three hours later this otherwise healthy teenage girl was dead.
I not only believe him, but I have information he did not have that relates to the ritual, and it supports his story to the hilt. The whole matter still gives me the horrors, but there you have it. A traditional village in that part of the world will not tolerate mixing with the next village over. To say that this is a nudge toward inbreeding is understatement.
In fairness to the trade, I should mention a story about a team of health workers in the same part of the world that had gone to a village to check on a possible contagious disease outbreak. As they finished, word came that the same question has arisen in a nearby village, and they started out despite the lateness of the hour. Night fell during their return so they soon found themselves utterly lost in jungle in the night. Before any predatory animal struck, a witch doctor stepped out of the darkness to lead them to safety after a bit of a scolding. Don’t judge the book by the cover, but you knew that.
What about the deep past? There are those who know as I do not, but somebody has said that you could take all the human bones that dated from before Homo sapiens emerged and toss them into the back of a pickup truck. Of course, more bones are found, but pickup trucks look like they’re getting bigger. Maybe it’s even true. According to the report every skull in that truck would show evidence of being bashed in the head to the extent that it killed the owner. Some wag wondered that all those eons of pre-history had not provided us with a single corpse that had not been murdered.
So then as now, there was a great deal of violence. One can safely assume that the violence occurred in the same context. It was all about keeping strangers out. Alas, the romantic in me yearns for a time before war was invented. Iceland seems to be at domestic peace. The ancient Minoans seem to have lived in peace. The Balkans were at peace, building cities of a hundred thousand at about the time cities were emerging in lower Mesopotamia; then they got overrun by warring tribes living in little hill forts. If memory serves some of those early tribes can be traced down to the present. This was enough to make me dream of a time of ancient peace. The weight of the evidence is against it. Ah, but a future without war, that should be possible. It’s just a matter of everybody agreeing to mutual reproductive isolation, and violence loses its selective advantage.
Local peace is present in much of the world. There is a lot of violence between tribes among poorly developed countries, where there is not a strong central government to provide identity. Such a government asserts the right to a monopoly on the use of violence. This limits local violence, but governments can be seen to exercise their self-given right to violence on scales ranging from the death penalty to total war. Seems a bit discouraging, but so far as I can tell, the truth – the concept that fertility requires moderate kinship – has never had a chance.
I used to spend some idle time imagining the ideal village, and since only a village can long endure, that would be the ideal life at any level of technological prowess. In my imaginary place there were enough cabins to house the number of families just at the level of repose. Everybody would be among friends all the time. The parents would indulge all the children. The children could approach any adult for distraction, learning and that vital adult contact children need so much.
Into this idyllic life I once interjected that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer without obvious limit. Eventually one or just a few people, men no doubt, would own it all, and the rest of us be reduced to abject poverty and debt slavery. Whither these energetic nabobs now? Owning the earth, they have but one way up; they can become gods. So, we must add to our ideal village a man-god, who needs but lie around in his lavish hut, being groomed, fed, bathed and having any needs the society is capable of providing. It might seem dull to you and me, but the only other viable career trajectory would consist of doing the grooming and so forth. If that is the place biology and economics comes to permanent rest, it seems to me that there should be no need to wait. They can have it now.
Give me a billion bucks, and I can set it up. I’ll find some agreeable government with a lot of impoverished countryside and willing to take some cash. I hunt out the elders of a half dozen villages and offer to give everybody a tidy income, which of course the elders will exercise discretion over, and in return for two months of the year they will pretend to worship the false god. He meanwhile will move every month so there will be lots of occasions to rejoice in his arrival and mourn his departure. The cosmetics of the buildings will be straw huts, although the now affluent villagers can do as they like inside with their new found prosperity. A mud hut might seem a bit small, but they can bunch them up and have the interior of a palace. The god, of course, will live without modern conveniences, since the whole point is to create the world he is taking us toward. During the five-month spans of divine absence the villagers can stay put, farm, hunt, go into town or whatever they like; it will not affect the god’s experience of social power.
If that is the end game, it would have its point. If everybody stays isolated and everybody respects the elder, violence should be minimized. Each village would be virtually immortal. Tradition would really be enduring tradition. But it wouldn’t work.
There is this Westermark effect to deal with. In a village such as envisioned, everybody would spend their entire childhood in close association with everyone they could ever marry. And as specified by the Westermark effect, they would not want to marry any of them. So, everybody in the town would be miserable all the time. As we have seen, discipline denying anybody to mate outside of the little village can be enforced, has been enforced within living memory. They call in a witch doctor. Such terrible coercion makes this idyllic idea for a town less than ideal.
But there is another way. I used to have a sort of a pen pal, who wrote extensively about what she called the manorial system. Now in common usage, a manorial system arises under conditions of impotent central government and poverty. People will steal from each other with a high hand. So energetic men or women will gather to themselves able bodied men armed with whatever the current kind of weapon might be and offer mutual protection. They then do deals with subsistence farmers around about, offering protection in return for labor and produce. In such a dark age everybody within the embrace of the deal is better off. The thieves lose out a bit, but they can abandon their piracy and join a pact. There will be, at least there was in Europe, a lower class, too, but the essence of the manorial system – the leader’s house was called a manor house – was the exchange of labor for safety. Of course, there were abuses; as they say, he who exchanges freedom for safety winds up with neither, but that is not the issue at hand. I just want to define manorial system as commonly used.
My friend had a different definition. I can hardly complain. I do it to.
Under her definition, the manorial system was the custom of any family with a boy to put him to work in another household and another village. I’m sure more boys from humble homes worked in the manor house than vice versa, but she never emphasized this. As I understood it, a family might farm out a boy and at the same time hire a boy from a distance. If everybody did it, the economic effect was a wash. The upshot would be that every boy would spend his childhood away from home. That got rid of the Westermark effect in a most nifty fashion. He could come back to his home neighborhood, where he was probably related to all of the available young women, fall in love and marry and settle as soon as land became available.
For me it would have been a bad thing. I treasured my parents. I still feel loyal to their love, their strength and their wisdom. I would not exchange that for anything. Alas, I never did get married, but I can’t say it was the fault of my parents, unless it was the fact that they were not reasonably close kin. But they could never have known what I have spent a lifetime figuring out. So, this manorial system as she used the term, could indeed nudge the community in the direction of inbreeding.
One process that might push in the direction of inbreeding would be harems. Suppose there is a population in which rich men could marry as many women as they could well afford, which would mean that there were a lot of men who would never marry at all. The consequent loss of their diversity to the population, in the absence of any change in the population size would mean lower overall diversity just as would an increase in inbreeding.
However, several years ago something happened. In the Netherlands, there are a lot of cows, not least of all because the production of Dutch cheeses supplies a large, eager market. Then a bull was found that carried a genetic disease, which of course they did not want. It should have been a trifling matter, but in fact in all of the Netherlands there were only six bulls. That was all they needed for their huge, healthy herds. Six bulls plenty – five bulls not so much. It would take a very few enormous harems, and a few very overtaxed husbands to achieve the same effect as those cows. So, I say harems increase inbreeding, but probably not enough to have a significant effect.
Alas that my life has led me to mention bestiality. The big states tend to have personalities, at least in the popular mind. There is a story from the Second American War of Session. General Robert E. Lee was inspecting one flank during preparation for a battle. The way was blocked because it passed within range of Union troops. Lee called to Confederate soldiers nearby, “Where are you from?”
“Texas, sir.”
“Hooray for Texas. There are some people over there. Do you think you could get them to go away?”
“Yes, sir.”
The Texans threw themselves down in the grass and wiggled forward until they could make life sufficiently unpleasant for the Union soldiers, who of course knew nothing about what was behind it all, to withdraw a bit.
So, Texas has its personality. California is defined in the popular mind by its politics. New York is characterized by multiple distinct communities more than most cities. And we have Florida Man. The joke is to speak of certain people as if he were always the same person. It’s not sexist, I should think, to leave the ladies out of this. One of Florida Man’s recent exploits was to steal a fork lift. He managed to cross three counties before the authorities picked him up. In the eternal quest to be fair, there is a balancing story of Florida Man relaxing in his back yard, which was bounded by a pond. An alligator came out of the water, “Like a rocket,” and grabbed Florida Man’s puppy. Florida Man plunged into the water, grappled with the gator and wrested the pup from its jaws, all without losing his cigar. The dog recovered just fine.
So, a few years ago, Florida Man was arrested for having sex with a cow. He announced that it was his constitutional right. There was no question of consent; unrestrained, the cow could simply have stepped away. Bestiality, like a number of other behaviors with sexual overtones, has no biological consequence but might just distract people from pursuing more biologically productive activities and in that distraction diminish the gene pool.
One more big cause is poverty. If you are poor, it is harder for you to get around. Your reduced geographic horizon causes a reduced social horizon. Even if you live in a great city, you can walk past a million people in an afternoon, but you probably cannot introduce yourself to anybody you don’t already know. Nearby neighborhoods may well have gangs at war with your own people and at all events you may meet with hostility. Baltimore as I remember it was a wonderful city. I used to tell people that if you were outside a Washington restaurant, you could drop in for a bite, but you could also hail a cab, go to Baltimore, eat and ride home, all of which would be cheaper and faster and you would eat better. In those halcyon days, engine trouble forced me to walk for a distance, and I passed some young lads lounging on steps. One called, “Do you want to fight?” It was said with no hostility; it was as if he was trying to be helpful. Why else would a stranger walk down that block?
Then, following I morosely think, the notion, “There are too many brown babies,” in black neighborhoods, there are said to be an enormous number of abortions of black babies and – probably because marijuana is illieagal – so many young men in jail that there is a significant demographic effect. Closer kinship results in increased fertility. And if those (what’s a nice term for racist bastards?) people really are trying to reduce the number of brown babies, they are having the opposite effect. It seems a little gallows humor is in order. More of this later.
And finally, there is topography. When I was at Harvard Medical School, we were told that a man decided to prove that the Mendelian laws of inheritance worked in humans as well as plants and animals. He needed a lot of family histories, and soon learned that talking about family is sort of a local sport in many regions of the South. So thither hied he and spent summers sitting on porches while matriarchs recited histories that it seemed to them their own families should care more about. In the end he proved his point and could present genealogies that followed Mendelian dogma. Of course, remembering problems such as colorblindness was easier than remembering advantages like great physical strength so the charts were littered with minor ailments. This in large part initiated the superstition that southerners are all feebleminded because we are inbred. I shall present contrary evidence later, but for now I assure you there was such a man and he did such work, because I have seen it.
One afternoon in medical school I and the others were toiling away in the lab when an instructor came along side of me and slapped down an old sheet of paper. It was, in fact, one of the original genealogical charts hand done by this researcher very long ago. I should have begged for a copy, but instead tried to analyze it on the spot. Yes, lines of inheritance were obvious. Yes, there were cousin marriages. But conspicuously, there were enormous families. I pointed this out to the instructor who said – let us all recite in a clear, round voice – “There are too many babies in the world,” (and in hushed tone: “too many brown babies”). I bethought me, “Ok, maybe. But babies are still important, and if it’s ever a problem I know the answer.”