who are we kidding?

Researchers in the UK have decided that the reason humans have so many diseases is that there were simply not enough mates around for them to be choosey; in a word, inbreeding. In some ways that makes a lot of sense. The mutations that need to take place to make a population immune to disease take a few generations to take place, and if you refuse to expand the family tree beyond a bush then your offspring are going to have trouble. The famous example of inbreeding causing a wealth of human discomfort is, of course, european royalty. Hemophilia, pointed heads and large flapping ears are just a few of the most notable afflictions of the english royal house, and their very close kinship to the Russian czars, for example,led to some obvious problems, such as being stark raving mad.

The problem that I have with this text-book example of what comes around by forgetting who is cousin to whom is that by reading European history one discovers that the europeans have always been quite mad, dying off by disease in huge numbers, and still are. Granted, disease was not as big a problem for them in the last century as war, but you have to admit it took the entire western world over a century to appreciate the concept of 'germs' and the benefits of not living with fleas and rats. The royal houses were simply the cream of the crop. The huge number of restrictions placed on them by the roman and eastern churches as to who could pork who was not because they were bored and just wanted to screw around with the laity, it was because the common people and the royalty alike were sleeping with their
cousins/sisters/brothers/aunts/uncles on a regular basis. If no one ever murdered anybody, there would be no reason to have laws against it. The Vatican simply spewed out volumes on incest.

So, was it because there were a lack of mates in europe? Let's look at Robert the Pious of France. He was first of the Capetian kings, and all around generally accepted as a nice guy, and thus the whole 'Pious' nomenclature. He ruled from 998 to 1031. He was educated by one of the finest minds in France at the time and had a flock of females with whom he could sire snooty offspring. What does he do? First thing: a request to marry his 2nd cousin zipped off to the Vatican. Robert the Pious managed this way to get his ass excommuicated. It wasn't until the high middle ages that the the Vatican decreed that everyone should sleep with some kind of clothing on their body. Why, it was because the commoners tended to sleep all together in a giant heap in the warmest room in the house fully naked. Not that there weren't other villagers to hook up with, but there is a certain convenience there that even modern europeans have trouble dealing with. The lack of mates? Hardly, the basic problem is that humans were nasty little primates in the beginning and they still are.

Six million years ago the population of 10,000 or so hominids was enough to force them into inbreeding, so the argument goes. Nonsense. Look around in east Texas for a while. Evidence of inbreeding is easy to locate in any Wal-Mart, especially if you look in the potted meat products and motor oil isle. There could have been a million primates running around the savannah and they still would have been playing grab-ass with cousin Oooka. Have you ever had to taken your young kids to the local zoo and watch the cute little monkey masturbate, or the big gorilla get some nookie? If you hang around the primate cage for longer than ten minutes you are bound to. That's what primates do best. There is a street not far from here where humans do basically the same thing, but they call them 'titty bars.' That does not necessarily imply incest, but it shows what kind of nuclear powered sex drive primates have. Why is it that it is still the most profitable thing on the internet? We are not really any different as a species.

So the next time you get a cold or flu, or you have big flappy ears and hemophilia, you can thank your ancestors for squeezing the gene pool a little too tight.