Why didn't many of the Pharoahs have birth defects?

Question

I heard that having children with a family member, like immediate family member, so why didn't many of the pharoahs have birth defects because imidiate family members married and had children. Example: Fathers marrying daughters, Siblings marrying, Mother marrying son

Answer 1

They did.  King Tut had a "hatchet face."

Answer 2

What makes you think they didn't?

Answer 3

Having marriages and children with family members does not necessarily mean birth defects.   It makes them somewhat more likely since both parents may have the same defect in their genes.   If they do not, there will probably be no defect in the offspring.

Answer 4

1) Inbreeding doesn't necessarily lead to "birth defects" it leads to homozygosity: Humans are diploid, and carry two copies of the nuclear genome. For most genes there are two or more alleles, so this means that you can carry 2 different alleles for most genes (heterozygosity). In prolonged inbreeding populations you see a trend to homozygosity, where  both alleles for most genes are the same. Many disorders are caused by pairing of recessive alleles, such as cystic fibrosis, and hemophilia, so inbreeding populations tend to have higher incidents of recessive diseases (modern day examples include Tay-Sachs disease in the Ashkenazi Jewish population, or genetic diseases in the North American Hutterite population). Recessive diseases are only a problem for inbreeding populations if the disease alleles are present.

2. There have been genetic tests done on many preserved remains from the Egyptian royal family that show inbreeding was not as common as once thought. It appears there was a lot of marital infidelity and many births were parented from outside the royal line (i.e. in 3000 BC no one is doing blood tests to ensure the king is really the father to his kids).

3. There some skeletal abnormalities and other diseases such as Marfan Syndrome common in the Egyptian royal line.  

Answer 5

Pharaohs have problems like everybody else. As a matter of fact, inbreeding (marrying and having children within a family) causes more genetic problems, because there is little genetic variation.

But they or their aides won't advertise their problems to people because it will make them look less powerful.