Prince William, obviously, belongs to a well established Royal Family. His bride to be, Kate Middleton, does not come from royalty at all. One could say that Kate is a commoner. There are those who feel that the marriage between a person of royalty, and a person who is not from a royal family, will diminish the public image of the royal family. However, from a genetic perspective, this can only strengthen their future family line.
Many genealogists will put together a medical family history. This is because there are a lot of diseases, disorders, and conditions that are genetically heritable. If a lot of people in your family have breast cancer, then you are at a higher risk of developing it yourself. This is because you share quite a bit of your genetic makeup with your relatives and ancestors.
While there are many things about you that would hope that your children would inherit, this isn’t true of everything. This is why some couples have genetic testing done in order to find out what risk there is of the couple passing on a certain disease to their potential offspring.
Some genes are recessive, and some are dominant. Usually, the healthy version of a gene is dominant, and the gene variation is recessive. If a child inherits two dominant genes from his parents, the child will be healthy. If the child inherits only one dominant gene, and one recessive gene, the dominant gene will override the recessive one, and the child will be healthy. That child is a “carrier” of the recessive gene. If the child receives two copies of the recessive trait, then the child will have the hypothetical disease.
The more closely two people are genetically related, the more likely it is that their children will end up receiving two copies of certain recessive traits that are associated with diseases. Genetically speaking, it is best to have a lot of diversity in your family tree. The more inbred a family line is, the higher the chances that their offspring will inherit recessive traits that would cause some kinds of diseases.
For centuries, it was a common practice for people who were part of a royal family to marry someone else who was also of a royal family. The problem with this, from a genetic standpoint, is that there wasn’t enough of them. Historically, there are quite a few royal people who got married to, and produced children with someone who was their cousin. There is a study going on about the Habsburg family, which was once a powerful royal dynasty, before it “inbred itself into extinction”. Prince William’s father is Prince Charles, who is obviously from the Royal Family. Prince William’s mother was Princess Diana, who was a commoner. This means that Prince William himself is not a direct product of inbreeding. His mother’s genetic line is not connected in any way with his father’s family tree. When Prince William marries Kate Middleton, who, like his mother, is a commoner, this combination of genetics will strengthen the future generations of the Royal Family.
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