The Dirty Truth Why Inbreeding Is So Dangerous

Hello, 42, here the doomsday clock is a symbolic representation of how close we humans are to eliminating ourselves from existence. It is not intended to be some kind of precise countdown, but rather a metaphor for the general danger humanity faces at any given moment with midnight. Representing our total annihilation, the clock was originally started in 1947, shortly after the end of the Second World War, when things seemed quite

dangerous

, two years earlier atomic bombs had been dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Nuclear tensions continued to rise. To reflect the dire situation, the doomsday clock was set at seven minutes to midnight.

In the intervening decades, the clock time has been reset 24 times to reflect the different existential danger humanity finds itself in today thanks to the continuing threat of nuclear war and the rapid advance of climate change combined with what scientists Apocalyptics call cyber information warfare the clock is set at 100 seconds to midnight, which means that never before in the history of humanity or at least since 1947 have we been closer to our own destruction as a species, which is why it has never been It has been more relevant to ask ourselves the not ridiculous question: could two people, the only survivors of some great global catastrophe, repopulate the Earth?

Maybe it would be an asteroid impact, maybe a nuclear war or unruly gay eyes, whatever the cause, if you found yourself as one half of the last couple on earth, would it be possible for you and your new best friend rebuild the human race from scratch assuming all the important parts survived the apocalypse fully functioning and after the inevitable I wouldn't sleep with you if you were the last man on earth the jokes had stopped being funny make the first generation shouldn't be No problem if you wanted to get things off to a particularly good start, you could even try to break the record for the most children produced by a single couple who are 69 years old, as set by the randy Russians, Mr and Mrs Vasilyev, back there. by the 18th century, although I think it had less to do with saving the human race and more to do with the fact that they somehow produced 16 sets of twins. seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets, plus the fact that condoms of the time were generally made from animal intestines and, unsurprisingly, were not that popular until now, fine, but as you might have predicted, the Things are going to get pretty.

It's complicated from here on out, there's no way around it. The first generation of post-apocalyptic survivors, all your children will be brothers and sisters, and that means getting to generation number two will require some pretty serious incest, at least you're just going to do it. having to talk to the dreaded birds and bees once it was the legendary founding father of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud who named incest as one of the two universal taboos, I guess Cersei and Jaime didn't get the memo on that, but the Lannisters stopped side the taboo of incest. It turns out to be remarkably true and all human societies around the world practice it in one form or another, although the exact rules about which family members are okay alter with the change from one culture to another.

Some scientists believe that this

inbreeding

avoidance behavior It's essentially programmed into us that we are simply born with a deep, instinctive aversion to the idea of ​​incestuous relationships and that would make sense because while I'm sure everyone who watches this video finds the idea of ​​having sex with their relatives completely repulsive close, that's not the only reason we should avoid it:

inbreeding

is also downright

dangerous

. Understand why we need to take a look at our genes. The human genome project was an international research effort to determine the sequence of the human genome and identify the genes that comprise it.

It contains among its many achievements, it is estimated that humans have between 20 and 30,000 genes each, we have two copies of each of our genes, one inherited from our father and the other from our mother, and mutations in some of these genes are responsible for unpleasant hereditary diseases. such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, and Tay Sachs disease, but most of the worst inherited diseases are recessive, meaning you will only have the disease if you inherit the same genetic mutation from both your mother and father , which makes sense when Think about it, if a dominant trait caused very serious defects, it would most likely disappear.

Having children with a close relative, say, a sibling with whom you share about half your DNA, dramatically increases the chances of your offspring will have two copies of whatever potentially harmful genes are hanging around in their DNA, the average person has about two of those, by the way, so it's a quick look at the science, but what happens when we look at inbreeding? in action in the real world? The island of Pinglab is a small atoll in Micronesia back in 1775 it was devastated by a huge typhoon that left only 20 survivors of the survivors. The king of the island whose name I will not decipher in this video suffered from a very rare syndrome called achromatopsia complete that leaves sufferers completely Unable to see color Today, one in 10 people in ping's lap suffers from a disease that may not seem like a big deal, but only one in 33,000 people suffer from it in the general population .

This is an example of what is known as the loss founder effect. of genetic variation that occurs when a new population is established from only a small number of initial founders. Now I have no doubt that total color blindness sucks. You can forget about a snooker career to begin with, but inbreeding can have much more deadly effects than that. Remember that there were 20 survivors of the typhoon in Pinglab, which means that no one was forced to have babies with their sister or brother to repopulate the island. If they were, things would probably have been much worse because the more closely related two people are, the more Inbreeding is dangerous: A study conducted in Czechoslovakia between 1933 and 1970 found that of children born to parents who were first-degree relatives , that is, parents or siblings, 40 percent had severe disabilities and 14 of them died young.

It is also believed that inbreeding was responsible. for killing goff one of the great royal dynasties of europe the hapsburgs the habsburgs ruled austria not to mention half of europe at one time or another for almost 650 years but like many people who have tasted power they were very interested in holding on to him in a truly extreme version of what happens in the family, staying in the family, the Habsburgs were known for arranging strategic marriages within their own family tree, uncles married nieces, cousins ​​married others cousins ​​and almost everyone committed incest like it was going out of style despite all our riches, lands and wealth, the Habsburgs were not the prettiest bunch.

Take a look at one of the many portraits that were painted of their endless kings and you will probably notice that most had one thing in common: a chin of truly epic proportions, the condition. What caused this facial anomaly is known as prognathism or, more appropriately, Habsburg jaw and was extremely widespread in the family due to inbreeding, but generations of action between cousins ​​caused much more than just incurable ugliness and a sledgehammer chin. . II of Spain also known as Carlos the Bewitched, apart from being the son of royalty, Carlos's life did not have a great start.

On the one hand, his mother was also his father's niece and his grandmother was also his aunt, in fact thanks to generations of marriages. inbred that is inbreeding for you and me Charles II was genetically speaking more inbred than the offspring of two brothers would be, as well as that distinctive Habsburg jaw that was said to be so severe that Charles had problems eating and speaking. Poor Carlos is forced to have several genetic conditions, including a combined pituitary hormone deficiency and renal tubular acidosis, he did not learn to speak until he was four years old, and by the time he was six he had measles, chickenpox, rubella, and smallpox as an adult.

He was said to be so spectacularly ugly that he frightened his own wife, but Charles was the last male in his line, so the Habsburgs were naturally anxious to ensure that he left an heir. Unfortunately, neither of his two marriages produced a child, and this despite Carlos following his doctor's advice to sleep. in the same bed as his father's corpse to improve his fertility how that master plan didn't work I guess we'll never know but we'll try they may never get anywhere having said that being like Charles' autopsy would eventually reveal that he only had one atrophied testicle that was and I quote black as a lump of coal, which probably shouldn't be a big surprise, ultimately Charles was going to be the last of the Habsburg monarchs in Spain and his death in November 1700 led to the War of the Spanish Succession as half of Europe fought over the remains of the world's largest endogamous empire.

Looking a little further back in history, we meet the Neanderthals, one of our closest human relatives, who last walked the earth a long time ago about 40,000 years ago. At the time it was thought that we, or at least our ancestors, were responsible for killing our dark, broad cousins. Why do anthropologists commonly assume that, despite having smaller brains, we homo sapiens were a much more intelligent group and could outwit the Neanderthals by using intelligence and planning to steal both? their food sources and their lives, but while that may be partly true, we are Earth's biggest bullies after all the recent evidence suggests that Neanderthals simply couldn't avoid inbreeding due to their relatively small population size. and therefore hid themselves out of existence.

What does all this incest-based pessimism mean for our post-apocalyptic couple bravely striving in their attempts to repopulate planet Earth? Unfortunately, it's all likely to end in tears and testicular atrophy. Now I'd forgive you for thinking that everything First of all, this is all a completely useless and hypothetical question: the doomsday clock may well suggest that catastrophe is near, but it seems quite unlikely that such an event would conveniently leave behind some sort of neo Adam and Eve to take care of starting the process. the most disturbing family in the world, but in reality the threat to our existence from an impending catastrophe is the reason this is all relevant.

It's fair to say that we are practically on planet Earth, not only have we laid all our human eggs. the basket of the blue planet we have hidden the chickens the chicken coop and a whole damn farm there too if something goes wrong on earth an asteroid impact for example we as a species are essentially and if we really are according to the doomsday clock simply A 100 seconds of such a disaster, it would be a very good idea for us to spread out as soon as possible. A nuclear war could very well wipe out life on Earth, but if only we could establish a couple of useful colonial planets among the stars.

We would have an insurance policy, the problem is that there are no other habitable planets nearby and by habitable I mean an Earth-like planet, of course there is Mars, but that will require revolutionary terraforming technology that we don't yet possess if we want to. To actually live on the surface and not in artificial bubble-like environments, the closest star to our own Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light years away, just to put that number into the kind of perspective our little human minds are capable of. To understand, which is about 25. billion miles, the current man-made object furthest from Earth is the Voyager 1 space probe which was launched by NASA in 1977, the probe left our solar system in 2012 and , as of March 2020, is a respectable 13.8 billion miles away.

Unfortunately, Earth is only 1,800 of the way to Proxima Centauri, at that rate it would take another 77,000 years or so to go the rest of the way. Technology has improved since the days of Voyager 1 and NASA's Juno probe that passed by. Jupiter in 2016 reached a speed of about 165,000 miles per hour, that kind of speed would reduce our journey to Proxima Centauri to about 17,000 years and assuming this type of technology continues to advance rapidly, it may not be long before we are ready. send a new colonial spaceship to the stars, but such a ship would certainly need to house its precious cargo of interstellar explorers for many generations, which is exactly why scientists need to know how manypeople would be needed to maintain a healthy population with a sufficiently diverse gene pool that could one day repopulate an entire planet is a question that could one day ensure the survival of our species, so what is the answer?

According to astrophysicist Frederick Marin, for a six thousand year journey to Proxima Centauri in a bright new space. arc you would need a minimum of 98 people, although it is worth noting that similar studies have reached very different conclusions. Some suggest we would need tens of thousands of people to make such a trip a success before I leave. I want to leave you all with a little thought experiment: have you ever wondered how many ancestors you have? I'm willing to bet it's something that's never crossed your mind, but figuring it out should be easy, since you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and sixteen great-great-grandparents. grandparents, so far there are 30 ancestors, all we need to know is how many generations there are in total and we should have the answer, but those with a mathematical mind may be starting to nervously use their calculators because the number of their ancestors seems to double with each generation and Anyone who has heard of the rice and chessboard problem will know that this kind of exponential growth can't be good if this method doubles as we move from one generation to the next.

Then we would have just over a trillion of ancestors after 40 generations, roughly in the last millennium of human history, a billion ancestors for reference is about 1,000 times more humans than have ever existed and that's just 40 generations out of an estimated 7,000. Then, what are we? missing, I'm glad you asked because as you can see the numbers just don't add up here, nature must have taken some shortcuts during your ancestral history to break that exponential growth somewhere; It certainly has and the answer is pretty simple when you think about it, all the people alive today are related, we are all part of the same giant family tree, which means we all have many, many shared ancestors or, to put it Otherwise, and if we are prepared to expand the meaning of the word just a little bit, your viewer 42 is inbred, you are welcome and thank you for watching.

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