I remembered a while
back, when my socials teacher was mentioning the commonality of royal families’
inbreeding, in order to “keep the royal blood” within. One of the said families
developed a hereditary genetic disorder called haemophilia, in which the
affected individual’s body is impaired in the way that their blood does not
clog. With a bit of research, haemophilia proves congruous to my hypothesis,
considering the inbred lineage: it is a recessive trait (although I am
oversimplifying here).
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| King Charles II of Spain, who suffered from many genetic disorders |
Most of the
descendants of these inbreeding families carried many rare genetic disorders,
one of the famous examples being Charles II of Spain, who suffered from
numerous (manymanymang) disabilities,
mental, physical and emotional. These inbred-born birth defects do embody the
concept of founder effect. Reproductively isolated and with a controlled, along
with very small, gene flow, each of those royal families have a relatively high
frequency of inherited disorders. Considering the genetic diversity, or in
other words, not procreating with someone very genetically similar to
themselves, is the key to life: as it prevents the expression of deleterious,
recessive genes (aka bad, harmful traits). Moreover, traits like Hapsburg jaw
and hemophilia are quite prevalent in participants of inbred lineage, but do
not represent the majority population (I have never met one whose tongue is so
engorged they drool)—indicating a bit of reference to bottleneck effect, or the
population not representing the allele frequencies of the initial one, as well.
The range of recessive genes is pretty remarkable, despite the tragedy of it
all (bleeding to death from a paper cut?). However, I do have one question: do
they eventually turn into a new species, if given enough time for their
reproductive isolation? Or just simply meet their recessive deaths, leaving no
descendants behind?
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