“Her actual name is: Penelope Mountbatten Hapsburg Hohenzollern Mulan-Pocahontas.” – The Simpsons
So, if your European Dynasty is the subject of Internet memes in 2010’s? You know you were inbred.
Last week on Monday’s post I wrote about how a massive amount of wealth that wasn’t tied to any production (New World gold) weakened Spain in every conceivable way (LINK). A comment on that post indicated that wealth alone wasn’t the whole story. The Hapsburgs were horrible leaders because they were rendered idiots by centuries of inbreeding and watching reality television.
That’s where we get to the Hapsburgs and genetics.
The House of Hapsburg started with the unlikely named Count Radbot. If ever there was an argument that Europe was run by time travelling robots or the writers of the game Fallout, well, the fact that a major European dynasty was started by a person named Radbot is probably the best evidence to date. Radbot built Hapsburg Castle in around 1020. His grandson, Otto, took the name of the Castle and became Otto Von Hapsburg. Eventually the family moved to Austria, and took over the country in 1276. They only ruled Austria until 1918.
Count Radbot was also a fixture in the Sunday comics for thirty years – often he would chase a cartoon cat and fight comically with him over hamburgers.
Besides the whole, “ruling huge chunks of Europe for 650 years” thing, the other thing that the Hapsburg dynasty was really known for was . . . serious inbreeding.
For being a bunch on inbred sometime-morons, they seemed to do okay. CC by SA 3.0, Original by Wikipedia User Alphathon
The Hapsburg family kept breeding cousins because that was a great way to not share power with outside families. Unfortunately, cousins that have been breeding only with each other limit the gene pool pretty severely. Charles II of Spain (shown below) had comparable genetics to a child born of a brother and sister. He was reportedly: “ . . . short, lame, epileptic, senile and completely bald before 35, always on the verge of death but repeatedly baffling Christendom by continuing to live.” Charles reigned between 1665 and 1700, and when he died it plunged Europe into the War of Spanish Succession as the Hapsburgs attempted to control who would become the next King of Spain.
Charles II of Spain. What a catch! I think he was featured in several of the “Hills Have Eyes” movies . . . keep in mind that painters tried to make their subjects look better in their portraits than they did in real life . . . .
Evidence is fairly clear at this point that genetic difficulties led to the final problems of Spain that led to the fall of the Spanish Empire.
This is an example of genetics that are too close . . . there is no variation because there is far too small a gene pool to contend with.
A modern city is the opposite. People are mobile, and cities are growing – there’s a great deal of movement from the countryside to the cities. A Yale® study indicated (LINK) that by 2030, 10% of the land surface of the Earth will be covered by cities. To get to that number, the equivalent of 20,000 football fields are being paved.
Daily.
Major cities perhaps are the opposite of diversity – they may be the greatest homogeneity. Unique cultures and traditions are moving to the cities and destroying diversity – even within groups that are remaining distinct. In order to avoid arguments that are outside of the point I’m making today, the metropolitan area that I’m picking to make my point is . . . Beijing, China (as opposed to Beijing, Oklahoma, population 6).
Beijing is interesting in that the ethnic makeup change appears to be zero – so I can happily avoid (at least for this blog) those questions. But what’s changing? The city has had a tremendous influx of people from 2000 to 2010, over eight million. But Beijing remains a Chinese city, specifically Han Chinese. So what’s the argument about diversity here, John Wilder?
China is a pretty big country, and there are about a million villages in China. The average, medium sized village has about 500 people, and 7 to 10 clans. Some of these villages have histories spanning thousands of years, with customs and families reaching far into the past. Over time, there is genetic drift – a village in Northern China doesn’t look nearly the same as one in Southern China. Both are Han Chinese, but differing diseases, climates, history, original genetic stock, and, well, luck play a part in allowing a diversity to flourish among the villages. China has a history of amazing innovation. How much a part of this does the village structure explain? How much genius sprang up because of the stability of those villages?
From Freeman Dyson (LINK):
West does not mention another scaling law that works in the opposite direction. That is the law of genetic drift, mentioned earlier as a crucial factor in the evolution of small populations. If a small population is inbreeding, the rate of drift of the average measure of any human capability scales with the inverse square root of the population. Big fluctuations of the average happen in isolated villages far more often than in cities. On the average, people in villages are not more capable than people in cities. But if ten million people are divided into a thousand genetically isolated villages, there is a good chance that one lucky village will have a population with outstandingly high average capability, and there is a good chance that an inbreeding population with high average capability produces an occasional bunch of geniuses in a short time. The effect of genetic isolation is even stronger if the population of the village is divided by barriers of rank or caste or religion. Social snobbery can be as effective as geography in keeping people from spreading their genes widely.
A substantial fraction of the population of Europe and the Middle East in the time between 1000 BC and 1800 AD lived in genetically isolated villages, so that genetic drift may have been the most important factor making intellectual revolutions possible. Places where intellectual revolutions happened include, among many others, Jerusalem around 800 BC (the invention of monotheistic religion), Athens around 500 BC (the invention of drama and philosophy and the beginnings of science), Venice around 1300 AD (the invention of modern commerce), Florence around 1600 (the invention of modern science), and Manchester around 1750 (the invention of modern industry).
These places were all villages, with populations of a few tens of thousands, divided into tribes and social classes with even smaller populations. In each case, a small starburst of geniuses emerged from a small inbred population within a few centuries, and changed our ways of thinking irreversibly. These eruptions have many historical causes. Cultural and political accidents may provide unusual opportunities for young geniuses to exploit. But the appearance of a starburst must be to some extent a consequence of genetic drift. The examples that I mentioned all belong to Western cultures. No doubt similar starbursts of genius occurred in other cultures, but I am ignorant of the details of their history.
I suggest you read the whole thing – it’s fascinating. And Dyson dates things properly – BC, AD. If you’re not familiar with Dyson, he’s a physicist and scientist of renown, the Dyson sphere – an artificial sphere built around a planet – is one of his most known ideas.
From this, one could surmise that the “end of diversity” even among ethnically homogeneous societies will rob us of genetic variation that will advance the human race, perhaps even greatly. Would places like Stanford® or Harvard® provide a place where this (intellectual) genetic diversity could flourish? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. The time and relative isolation required for drift appear to be missing.
Genetics may be like water – when frozen through inbreeding, no progress is possible. When boiling in a city, no usefully differential structures form in the chaos. When in the right size populace for a period of time? The lukewarm water of interesting change, complexity can form. Like Goldilocks: too hot, too cold, and then just right.
What do we lose if we don’t have that drift, if we don’t have those periodic bursts of genius arising out of that properly complex world? Is it odd to think that cities, which we think of as engines of diversity are really just engines of future homogeneity?
Thankfully we don’t have to worry about that, because our new robotic overlord, Count Radbot, will come from the future to save us all!
