If you don’t know much about DNA, you should.
It’s a very useful tool to help you know what you can ignore.
Because DNA says a lot about a lot of things.
And in the case of royalty, it says basically nothing.
Let’s have a look, starting with the basics.
Basics
As outlined in the enlightening book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford, humans have been fabricating stories for a really long time.
Well, I’ll qualify that statement.
Anatomically modern humans haven’t been around that long—perhaps just 200,000 years among the 4 billion years of life on Earth, or 0.005 percent of that window.
But in the tiny sliver of time that humans have been around, yes, they’ve proven themselves quite competent in making up nonsense.
Until 1953.
That’s when the structure of DNA was discovered.
And since then, there has been an emphasis on truth. (Whether the aforementioned humans would like to hear it is another story.)
Here’s the truth about royalty…
Royalty
No single royal family receives more attention than the one that sits atop the United Kingdom. And no matter which angle you take, the question is: Why?
The mathematical angle
More humans live on Earth now than at any other time in history. That means that, barring the more sci-fi concepts of cloning and asexual reproduction, a much smaller number of people served as ancestors to the larger modern population.
In other words, if you go back far enough, those clean family trees we’re used to seeing begin to look far more like convoluted webs. The result is that common ancestry is mathematically (and genetically) impossible to avoid.
In fact, everyone of European descent may be able to claim some ancestry from one hypothetical individual who lived a mere 600 years ago.
To take it one step further, everyone on Earth may be able to claim some ancestry from one hypothetical individual who lived 3,600 years ago.
In the words of Rutherford, you are of royal descent, because everyone is.
The DNA sequencing angle
Say, for the sake of argument, that the above comes across as a bit too abstract. What does the actual sequence of DNA say about royalty?
As a reminder, the human genome is composed of 3 billion bases (one of just four kinds that go by the letters A, T, C, and G) paired with another 3 billion bases to make 3 billion base pairs, all packaged neatly into the famed double helix.
The question becomes whether there is a specific sequence of bases that confers royalty.
Of course, if you look at just one country—specifically the one family that has been arbitrarily assigned the label of royal—you will see shared sequences. Why? Because royal families are notorious for inbreeding.
The real question is whether humans across the world who have been declared as royal share a sequence in their DNA that validates the label. Is there a gene or set of genes (or even a non-coding region of DNA) present in such individuals and not present in others that translates into importance?
Never say never, but we’ll go with probably not.
The paternity testing angle
To make things more relatable, we can ask a simple question: Are these people really who they say they are?
In 2012, in the city of Leicester (England), the remains of Richard III were discovered, allowing for extraction of the monarch’s DNA. Richard, as you might remember, died a violent death in 1485, putting a sudden end to Plantagenet rule and giving rise to the well-known Tudor dynasty.
The Tudors claimed to have a common ancestor with Richard, namely John of Gaunt (son of Edward III), legitimizing their claim to the throne above and beyond the mere fruits of war.
Such genetic claims can easily be verified by the voyage of the Y chromosome, the piece of DNA that is passed only from father to son. And it turns out that modern descendants of John of Gaunt have Y chromosomes that do not match that found in Richard III, meaning somewhere along the way, false paternity entered the picture.
Given the inability to exhume all individuals in the complex network to figure out exactly where things went wrong, we’re left with mere speculation. Among the innumerable speculative comments that could be made, one is that the current Windsor family, descended from the Tudor family, could have a flimsy claim to the throne, at least genetically speaking.
In the late-18th century, the United States and France made the rather bloody decision to rid themselves of their respective monarchies. While all were not on board at the time (that’s you, Canada), it turns out that based on discoveries a couple centuries later, the Americans and French might have been on to something. Just don’t tell the United Kingdom.
