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uniface wrote:

I shudder to even consider the descendents of Queen Victoria and the resulting medical problems due to consanguinity...

Very largely a bugbear of fairly recent manufacture, CS. The Pharaohs of Egypt married their sisters for hundreds of years with no ill effects.

Really?
So Tut-Anch-Amun was a strapping young lad?

As did the Inca royal stratum. And the Ptolmaic Greeks weren't far behind them. Sometimes it seems the Herodians never even bothered with the marriage aspect. There are a lot of fables around sexuality that history shows to be falsehoods; that consanguinity necessarily results in less fit offspring is one of them. If the stock's sound to begin with, up to a point, inbreeding just produces more of it. Many of the Rabbinical genealogies have been an unbroken string of first-cousin unions from time out of mind.

Does it occur to you that genetic 'misfits' and 'failures' might have been willfully ignored by recordists throughout time?
As they are today: are you aware how 5 billion of the total 6 billion people on this planet treat their mentally and physically handicapped children? They hide them! Literally in as deep a closet they can find. Until they die of malnutrition, abuse, or simple lack of care/neglect. Because the parents and siblings are deeply ashamed of them, as they believe that these kids are a manifestation of a punishment from the gods for some terrible misbehavior they, the parents, or even their whole ancestral line, or the village, etc., are guilty of. A curse.
That's the painful, and embarrassing reality.

So if records don't show them it doesn't mean for one second they weren't there. It only means that records don't show them!

Maybe so. But you're painting that onto the canvas yourself. It's not like parents in royal lineages (or in common ones) needed ten whacks at producing one normal child to have one. They'd have died out if that were the case.

Heck, look at cattle breeding, where three or four bulls sire (by the magic of artificial insemenation) nearly all of the next generation of their breed.

uniface wrote: Heck, look at cattle breeding, where three or four bulls sire (by the magic of artificial insemenation) nearly all of the next generation of their breed.

With disastrous statistics for the second and third generations. Like 5 times as many stillbirths. That's why the live-born usually get slaughtered before they're a year old, so that many genetic defects have not yet been revealed/expressed themselves. And their meat can still be sold and consumed. Nobody the wiser...

CJD is suspected to be a genetic defect in cattle caused by inbreeding. One that can somehow cross the species boundary and infect human brains!

There are many more rampant genetic defects in cattle, but the general public doesn't hear about them, because there are 'solutions' like early slaughter. And, in any case, so long as these genetic defects don't directly affect humans they simply fly under the radar.

uniface wrote:Forensic crime scene investigators are really up against it there. Dental records are useless (nobody has any teeth left by age 25), and all the DNA is essentially identical

(Just kidding)

Seemingly compelling reasons why sister/cousin/niece marriage couldn't have happened on a wide scale founder on the shoals of evidence that it did. One case in point being the Levitical grocery list of prohibited degrees (there being no need to prohibit the unthinkable)* -- a patently late interpolation at grotesque variance with the documented practice of the people recounted in it. Abraham-Sarah : half-siblings (same father, different mothers). Isaac-Rebekah : first cousins. Jacob-Leah : first cousins. Jacob-Rachel : first cousins.

*Note that, with all the detail this goes into, father-daughter relations do not fall under the ban (push people too far, and they write you off).

[quote="Rokcet Scientist"]

CJD is suspected to be a genetic defect in cattle caused by inbreeding. One that can somehow cross the species boundary and infect human brains!



CJD has little or nothing to do with genetics or breeding, according to everything I've read on the subject.

BSEs, the barnyard version of CJD, is an abnormally folded protein... it's a prion disorder. It was started by the practice of 'recycling' all manner of organic remains. Specifically, sheep remains. Sheep infected with scrapie (sp?) were slaughtered, processed and the bone was ground up and fed back to healthy sheep in their feed. In effect, a herbivore was made into a cannibalistic carnivore, of sorts. The practice was also used with cattle.

http://bmb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/66/1/185

circumspice wrote:
CJD has little or nothing to do with genetics or breeding, according to everything I've read on the subject.

Seems I read more than you on the subject then, doesn't it?

Mad cow disease was caused by feeding ground up animal protein, unspecifed, to cattle. A practise now banned.
RS, what happens after the third generation of inbreeding in cattle then? Where does the fourth come from?
As regards Tut, one Swallow etc.

Roy.

I concur, incredible work. I've generally considered What If Richard had won and the Tudor's had not come to influence?

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