Читать книгу Sunshine on an Open Tomb - Tim Kinsella - Страница 27

Two hyenas don’t muster the energy to fight every time they come across each other.

Their every interaction affirms and deepens the established social order until the submissive challenges the dominant.

Nature rewards antagonistic behavior with a dominant social role, access to food, and mating possibilities.

The meek need to weigh the cost-benefit ratio of a challenge.

The top three bonnet macaque males account for over 75% of all mating within their population.

These higher-ranking offspring have a better survival rate, not only cuz they’re more physically fit, but they also receive the spoils of being The Prince.

This system repeats in rodents, most carnivores, and the dwarf mongoose.

Whether it’s the hopping dark-eyed junco or oystercatchers, the dominant couple in most monogamous bird species always gets the best territories with better food and water and less predators.

But even without a hundred pound crown, defending your spoils against the envious many can be exhausting.

High ranking brings inherent costs: a higher metabolic rate and higher stress hormones.

Despite their many extra appendages like gunpowder and telephones, the dimly sentient blobs ultimately remain subject to these same fundamental laws of nature.

Higher genetic variation means better health.

The isolated polygamous communities of Utah suffer incredibly high rates of severe mental retardation.

One study estimated their average IQ to be about 25.

And the Vadoma Tribe in western Zimbabwe mostly have two toes.

I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with having only two toes, but I do know that it’s uncommon.

Common physical health defects of inbreeding include:

- Reduced fertility, both in litter size and sperm viability

- Increased genetic disorders

- Autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis

- Cancers

- Ciliopathies

- Cleft palate

- Diabetes

- Heart Disease

- Hypertension

- Inflammatory bowels

- Mental retardation

- Mood disorder

- Obesity

- Refractive error

- Infertility

- Fluctuating facial symmetry

- Lower birth rate

- Higher infant mortality

- Slower growth rate

- Smaller adult size

- Loss immune system function

And that most famous genetic disease circulated among European royalty: Hemophilia.

These facts attest to The Bloodline’s superlative power, power enough to reverse the laws of nature.

The more purified The Bloodline, the more concentrated the totality of its power.

The effects of inbreeding were very personal to Darwin.

He married his first cousin.

They had 10 children, and three died before the age of 10.

Of the children that survived, six of them had long-term marriages, but three of these produced no children.

When Darwin first spoke of his ideas re: evolution by natural selection in a letter to his best friend Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, he said that doing so felt like “confessing to a murder.”

In ancient Egypt you’d ideally marry your sister or halfsister cuz women carried The Bloodline.

Jean V Armagnac obtained a papal dispensation justifying the three kids he had with his sister Isabelle.

That was rare among Europeans, but he flaunted his brazen eccentricities.

Marriages with aunts, nieces, nephews, and cousins were perfectly common among royalty, until finally, the gene pool became so scant, all of European royalty was related to one another.

Francis II from The House of Hapsburg-Lorraine and his cousin Maria Theresa of Naples had several children with genetic health problems.

Five of their children died in early childhood, and their daughter Marie Anne was mentally deficient, her face hideously deformed.

And their son Ferdinand suffered hydrocephalus, aka “Water Head,” which means he had a humongous head and intense mental deficiencies.

He had daily seizures.

But of course none of that prohibited him from eventually becoming Emperor.

When informed of the revolutions of 1848, he responded with true befuddlement, “But are they allowed to do that?”

The most extreme example of a genetic trait aggravated by royal inbreeding, The Hapsburg Lip, was typical of their bloodline for over 600 years.

This condition intensified to the point that King Charles II of Spain’s tongue was so gargantuan and his underbite so severe, he couldn’t chew food.

And no one understood a word he said.

And he constantly drooled.

And 300 years later as boys, with a sing-song bite, my brothers would call me “Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing Chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-rrles.”

My nickname became Chuck, which made mocking me intrinsic to addressing me at all.

Ultimately, King Charles II’s impotence led to the extinction of the dynasty, which caused the 14-year War of Spanish Succession, in which 500,000 soldiers fought.