>>12146542>Incest is a form of inbreeding.Sure, but it's an *extreme* form of inbreeding. Inbreeding, to a certain degree, is not harmful. In fact, I recall reading that the "healthiest" breeding partner is a 3rd degree cousin (after that, there is risk of "outbreeding")
>And in the post I quoted Anon was talking about how great nobility marrying nobility was. Which is exactly what the Hapsburgs did, until every marriage prospect was a 1st cousin.That is *not* what they did. The Habsburgs did not marry into other noble families, which would have been fine, but married other Habsburgs exclusively. Obviously that was a recipe for a disaster. But the fact that non-Habsburg royal families did not usually suffer from debilitating congenital diseases, despite also marrying exclusively into other noble families, should be enough to convince you that the Habsburg case was very atypical.
>But more importantly, nobility marries nobility because they have a massively inflated opinion of themselves, not because of some understanding of genetics.Sure, but due to the fact that a nobility title and position is a scarce resource which cannot be shared among all of a noble family's descendants, this inbreeding led to a concentrating effect, whereby the more talented children usually inherited the title, while the less talented children slid back into the peasantry, thus improving the gene pool of the nobility. I agree that this effect was not intentional, but it happened nonetheless.
This is a phenomenon which is observed in every country which had a hereditary elite. In the UK, people with Norman surnames dominate Oxbridge, in Japan, people with samurai surnames dominate all elite positions, in India brahmins dominate, etc. And I want to make it clear that their position of dominance is not due to any kind of cultural or material heritage, but due to their genetic superiority, which was gradually built up through centuries of careful inbreeding.
