On October 7, 1649, the King of Spain, one
Philip IV, took a lady’s hand in marriage. Her name was Maria Anna, later to become Mariana
of Austria. What might perhaps sound unusual or unethical
to our modern viewers is the fact there was a large age-gap in this relationship, with
the king being 44 years of age and his new wife being a mere girl at age 14. What might perhaps be more surprising is the
fact that the bond was between uncle and niece. How would that go down in 2020? Well, given the year this has been so far,
it’d be the least insane thing to happen yet. This pairing belonged to a royal family named
the Habsburgs, a dynasty well-known for not letting the apple fall far from the family
tree. They inbred, and they did it with such enthusiasm
that it might be the reason for their empire coming crumbling down. Habsburg inbreeding was so remarkable in fact,
that you could say it created monsters of children. Mariana and Philip’s son was living proof,
a man that was arguably the most deformed inbred person in the circles of European royalty. Today you are going to hear some of the worst
inbreeding stories in history, and you are also going to hear some crazy stories about
the inbreeders of recent times. You will learn who did it, why they did it,
and why it wasn’t such a good idea. But let’s stay with Philip and Mariana for
now, because we’re certain you want to know how that ended. What you have to understand is that the Habsburg
family tree looks more like a stump. The same names pop-up again and again, and
that’s because they kept things within the family when it came to procreating. The purpose of the inbreeding was mostly a
matter of keeping the heritage in their own hands. What they didn’t know back then was just
how bad it was. You only have to look at the parents of Philip
and Mariana…both families had a handful of children and few survived into adulthood. As for Philip and Mariana’s kids, only two
out of five would make it to adulthood. One of them named Charles has become one of
the most famous kings ever known, and that wasn’t because of his bravery, or brutishness,
but because he was a near-monstrosity of a child…a person so malformed that he got
the nickname, “The Bewitched.” As you’ll see in this show, he’s not the
worst example of inbreeding, but he’s certainly up there. Because Charles was the product of uncle and
niece he not only became their son, but he also became their great-nephew and first cousin. The strange thing is, and something we’ll
get around to explaining, is that Charles’ sister, Margaret, didn’t suffer the same
plight as he did. Ok, so she had a long list of living child
births and miscarriages, and she died at just 21 from ill-health, but compared to Charles
she lived a fairly healthy life. Poor Charles was doomed from the start…the
kid was born with such an elongated jaw that he couldn’t speak until the age of four. Even when he was up and running in the talking
department he still found it difficult to speak, all because of this oversized jaw – what’s
become known as the Habsburg jaw... Charles wasn’t the only Habsburg to be afflicted
with it. During his first few years he had about every
childhood disease possible, including smallpox, chicken pox, measles, and rubella, and each
of those back then could have killed him. He spent much of childhood in a sickly state,
so much so that Mariana barely let him out of her sight. Nonetheless, the child became a man, a man
that walked badly and drooled a lot, and a man that was said to live in a constant state
of debilitating depression. His mood might not have been lifted by the
fact that people chatted behind his back, saying he was so ugly he was hard to look
at. He didn’t have children himself, although
it wasn’t for trying. Some historians speculate that he wasn’t
able to procreate due to his being inbred, and as you’ll find out, that’s not unusual
in the world of relative relationships. He grew up, but suffered so much from illness
that people were surprised he made it to 30. In fact, one historian wrote that he was,
“short, lame, epileptic, senile and completely bald before 35, always on the verge of death
but repeatedly baffling Christendom by continuing to live.” In the year 1700, he became ill…again…and
just before his 39th birthday he dropped down dead. The autopsy report read that on examination,
his corpse, “did not contain a single drop of blood; his heart was the size of a peppercorn;
his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous; he had a single testicle,
black as coal, and his head was full of water.” It was a miracle he lived as long as he did. Royal inbreeding happened all over Europe…it
happened all over the world in fact. In Asia, it occurred in Japan, Korea, China,
and it happened quite spectacularly in Thailand. We say that because in the 19th and late 20th
century a king there, named Chulalongkorn, got it on with so many people it’s mind-boggling. It wasn’t that unusual, given that his pop
had 82 children with various women. That father had 32 wives and “concubines”
– meaning a kind of lesser partner,not a spouse – but the son Chulalongkorn would
beat that. If you count his wives plus his other named
partners, Chulalongkorn was involved with a total of 116 people, but what’s perhaps
even stranger is his four wives were all his half-sisters. You heard that right...he got hitched and
had children with his father’s own girls. With those sister-wives, as well as with his
consorts and concubines, he would have 77 of his own kids. The difference between a consort and concubine,
by the way, is that a consort is more like a minor wife, not just a partner. Let’s now see what happened to some of those
kids that he had with his half-sisters. Well, there was Princess Deb Nariratana. She was ill all her life and died aged eight. Her brother, Prince Tribejrutama Dhamrong,
died at six. Then there was Prince Siriraj Kakudhabhand,
dead at two. In fact, if you look at his children who actually
survived childbirth, many of them died when they were still kids. If you look further at his long list of children
what you see is a pattern. The children he had with his sisters for the
most part died very young, and the children he had with his consorts also died young for
the most part. It seems the children that had the best chance
of a long life were those he had with his concubines. All will be explained shortly as to why. Moving away from royalty, most of you we’re
sure have heard of the British scientist Charles Darwin. When he wasn’t writing about evolution he
was with his beloved wife, Emma Darwin, formerly Emma Wedgewood...Charles’ first cousin. Prior to the marriage, Charles had no scruples
about getting involved with his cousin. What concerned him more was the loss of his
free time that marriage would cost him, and also the fact he’d have less cash to buy
books. Nonetheless, they tied the knot and went on
to have ten kids. The problem was, some of those kids would
not live very long. His second child, Anne, died just aged ten
after contracting the disease scarlet fever. His son, Charles, died in infancy, and another
girl died after only two weeks. Something that plagued Darwin was not only
that he lost some kids early on in their life, but the fact many of his children that grew
up suffered from all kinds of life-threatening and strange illnesses. It was as if they had been born weak, or in
his own words when he spoke of his kids, “They are not very robust.” Three of those that did live a long time didn’t
have any children of their own, and it’s now speculated that the fact that they were
the result of inbreeding could have led to their inability to procreate. Darwin once said in a moment of sadness, “We
are a wretched family and ought to be exterminated”. At one point he wrote that one of his boys
had injured kidneys and very swollen glands in his neck, while another boy he said was
consumed by “hysterical sobbing” and “semi-convulsive movements.” What was happening to his children, he wondered,
and then he began to think that it was somehow his fault for the decision he had made to
marry his cousin. You see, he noticed that cross-bred plants
were generally healthier than self-fertilised plants. Maybe marrying cousins, he pondered, wasn’t
such a great idea. At the time the scientific community could
only speculate that consanguineous marriage, meaning a marriage between people who are
closely related, could result in things like deafness, or blindness, but what if it could
result in children being very sickly, or even dying young? Darwin actually asked the government to try
and collect data on this, but it didn’t happen in his lifetime. What he didn’t know was that bacterial infections
are linked to inbreeding, and that’s how two of his children died. You should know this, too, Darwin's maternal
grandparents were also related, and as you’ll soon see, that very likely mattered. These days 31 states in the U.S. ban marriage
between first cousins as do a handful of countries. So we should now ask, is there such a big
risk if you marry your first cousin? That answer depends on who you are talking
to, and that’s because while first cousins only share as many as 12.5 percent of their
gene, some experts think there’s only a very small risk that first-cousin offspring
will be born sickly. Ok, but what about those people who procreate
with their half sibling, or those that go the whole hog and have a child with their
full sibling? Well, we share about 25 percent of our genes
with a half sibling and about 50 percent with a full sibling. With an uncle and niece or aunt and nephew,
25 percent of the genes are shared. What could go wrong, especially if babies
are born to a biological brother and sister? It does sometimes happen, and we call this
sibling incest, like in this tragic story. A German man named Patrick Stübing was adopted
at a young age after his drunken father tried to stab him with a knife. When he was 23 years old, he discovered his
biological family, including his biological sister, Susan. In 2001, their mother died, and while there
was sadness, the two siblings really hit it off…so much so, that they began sleeping
together. To cut a long story short, they had four children
named Eric, Sarah, Nancy, and Sofia. As for Patrick, he was arrested and sent to
prison since incest is illegal in Germany…We should say that legality of incest differs
from country to country and is usually not illegal if the relationship is between two
consenting adults. Moving on. Susan said she was in love with Patrick and
she said after his arrest that she hoped the law would change. “I just want to live with my family, and
be left alone by the authorities and by the courts,” she said. That’s all fine and well, but this is not
a show about the ethics of incest. What we want to know is how are those children
doing? Well, when Patrick was asked about his children’s
welfare, he admitted that the kids were struggling. One had epilepsy and learning difficulties…another
also had learning difficulties…one had to have a heart transplant in infancy because
of a heart defect…and one of them is fine. That one, Sofia, is the only child that still
lives with her parents, or she did so, when she was last talked about in the media. The others all had to go into care. So, that’s a lesson for all you people thinking
about getting into a relationship with your brother or sister. The risk is high that the children you have
could be disabled or prone to having a disease. The risk of having a disabled or very ill
child with your cousin is thought to only be about two or three percent higher than
it would if you have children with someone not related to you at all, but as you’ve
seen today, if this inbreeding goes on for generations it can lead to many ills. Ok, so now you want to know why this happens. Let’s get scientific. You see, you are a product of your mom and
pop. You have two copies of each gene, well, most
of them, and one copy comes from your father and one from your mother. But what if one copy of the gene is faulty? It doesn’t usually matter, because you’ll
have the working copy from the other parent. If both copies are bad though because you’re
too closely related... if both are what are called faulty recessive genes, then that child
could be born with an autosomal recessive condition. These are rare, since it’s unlikely that
parents carry the same faulty gene. If they do, whether related or not, it doesn’t
always mean the child will be born with the disease, it just means there is a chance he
will. That’s why some siblings that are born inbred
are very sickly and die young, while others are perfectly healthy. It’s a bit of a lottery, but the good news
is that a doctor interviewed on the matter said it’s “vanishingly unlikely” that
unrelated lovers will carry the same faulty genes. It can happen, but it doesn’t happen much. So, that’s the problem with inbreeding. Cousin-cousin and you should be ok, but the
odds start climbing when you get to aunt-nephew, and especially brother and sister, or even
brother and half-sister. If your family, like Darwin’s, or worse,
the Habsburgs, have been doing the cousin-cousin, uncle-niece thing for generations, there could
well be a prevalence of the same disease or condition. If generations of a certain culture of people
have been drinking at quite a small gene pool, then you can get various diseases and conditions
turning up more frequently than in other cultures. Take for instance the preponderance of hemophilia
in European royalty, or babies being born with an extra finger or toe in an isolated
Amish community. A good example, if not horrific and very unusual,
was inbreeding at a remote farming community in Australia that had gone on for a long time. The authorities found these people just a
few years ago, and many of the children were deformed because they’d inherited the same
faulty genes. Some were deaf, others were blind, and most
could hardly speak intelligibly or understand the cops that found them. We can’t tell you the name of the valley
where they lived or the real family name, because the media didn’t release that information. We can say that the community started in the
1970s with two New Zealand immigrants that the press called Tim and June. When the cops arrived in 2012, there were
forty of them, all originating from that first couple. This was a really severe case of inbreeding,
and what it resulted in was those children certainly lived in no Eden. Our advice is, don’t try and replicate the
story of Adam and Eve...you might get blind, deaf and dumb kids. Now you need to watch this, “Taboos Around
the World.” Or, have a look at this…
