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The art and genetic lineage of the ever-popular Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, painter and chronicler of the Moulin Rouge, seem as tightly entwined as the strands of a double helix. By , when Henri was born, the family had lost political power but still ruled vast estates, and their lives had settled into a baronial fugue of endless shooting, fishing, and boozing.
Scheming to keep the family lands intact, the various Toulouse-Lautrecs usually married each other. But these consanguineous marriages gave harmful recessive mutations a chance to crawl out from their caves. Every human alive carries a few malignant mutations, and we survive only because we possess two copies of every gene, allowing the good copy to offset the bum one. With most genes the body gets along just fine at 50 percent of full manufacturing capacity, or even less.
The odds of two random people both having a deleterious mutation in the same gene sink pretty low, but relatives with similar DNA can easily pass two copies of a flaw to their children. His skull seemed swollen, too, and his stubby arms and legs attached at odd angles. And honestly, the Toulouse-Lautrecs escaped unscathed compared to other inbred aristocrats in Europe, like the hapless Hapsburg dynasty in seventeenth-century Spain.
As the saying goes: with nobility, familiarity breeds. In the most backward Spanish villages at the time, 20 percent of peasant babies usually died.
