My ‘Bloodline’ Ends With Me — This Isn’t Game of Thrones

We shouldn’t procreate like we’re raising heirs to a throne

Even royalty eats the food of us plebs. Image by master1305 on Freepik

I’ve never understood people who say ‘I need to continue my family bloodline’ when speaking about having kids. Slow your roll there King Joffery. This isn’t Game of Thrones, you have no bloodline, you just have a receding hairline, bacne, and two mortgages.

‘But I need to carry on the family name!’

Calm down, Cleopatra. There are enough Campbells out there, the surname will survive without your soup-eating offspring. Also, you’re thrice divorced and have had as many names. Your last name wasn’t even yours to begin with, it was your dad’s.

I don’t even know why we take the father’s last name anymore. If I started a family I’d have us pick our last name. I understand this could be problematic though, as we only need so many families with the last name McAwesomePants.

Maybe we could use hyphenations. In which case I’d go with Firkin. Then I’d be Robin Firkin-Wilding. My husband could be Ryan Firkin-Reynolds.

There, I solved it.

‘But, but…the bloodline thing’

You’re an asthmatic underachiever with a crippling porn addiction. Your greatest contribution to society thus far is perpetually taking up two parking spots because you can’t parallel park. Your ‘bloodline’ could use chlorination, not procreation.

I’m no better. I have celiac disease, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and a snaggle tooth. All my teeth look like something out of a ‘before’ catalog for a medieval British dentist. I fall up the stairs on a regular basis. And for the creme-de-la-creme icing on the cake — I write dick jokes for a living.

My family is no better either, we’re a genetic dumpster fire of health issues, including heart disease and mental illness. We even have the weird ones, my uncle has Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis (affecting 1 in 100,000 people), and my dad has Guillain-Barré syndrome (also affecting 1 in 100,000 people). We’re a rare breed of weirdos.

My bloodline is broken.

Statistically, yours is probably shite too.

‘But Robin, you’re so smart and funny!’

Thank you for playing along with my game. Yes, I’m funny. But that’s not genetic. It takes decades to develop this type of humor via a series of unhealthy coping mechanisms.

Intelligence can be inheritable, but it’s no guarantee. An argument could be made though that we need more intelligent people reproducing, lest we end up in an Idiocracy scenario. Something that may be happening already, especially with smart women.

Satoshi Kanazawa at the London School of Economics performed an Idiocracy-type study and found that:

“One-standard-deviation increase in childhood general intelligence (15 IQ points) decreases women’s odds of parenthood by 21–25%. Because women have a greater impact on the average intelligence of future generations, the dysgenic fertility among women is predicted to lead to a decline in the average intelligence of the population in advanced industrial nations”

Ok, maybe some of us do need to continue our bloodline. But my bloodline still needs some Clorox.

You likely don’t need a progeny of mini-me’s either. Neither of us represent the peak of humanity that would be chosen on the list of people to clone and send into space on Elon’s ark. A space ark designed to transport the remnants of human civilization to Mars in case (or, when) we destroy the planet.

We couldn’t possibly be in an Idiocracy now right? (Screenshot from Idiocracy from 20th Century Studios)

Who Should Continue Their Bloodline?

My answer to life, the universe, and everything is always Ryan Reynolds. Hugh Jackman would be another solid candidate, have you heard that beautiful man sing or crack a joke? Now that’s a human specimen worth repeating.

I’m aware that my answer conveniently means we’ll have mini Deadpools and Wolverines for generations to come.

Well, what was I supposed to say — the royal bloodline? Nope. Weird things happen in royal bloodlines, often springing from a kiddie pool of genetic diversity. King Charles II of Spain is a notable example, after 16 generations of inbreeding he was born with physical disfigurements and a host of health problems including epilepsy.

One of his various impairments was infertility, which led to the collapse of the Habsburg dynasty after his death in 1700.

Royal bloodlines could disappear and I wouldn’t lose sleep. They certainly aren’t the pinnacle of evolution either. If we have limited cloning spots to fit on the human ark, give some of them to the Obamas, some to Neil deGrasse Tyson, and at least one to Ryan Reynolds.

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Before it sounds like I’m advocating for eugenics, I’m not, well probably. There are certainly flaws in that philosophy that don’t bear repeating. But at the other end of the pendulum is the possibility of an Idiocracy, something that Kanazawa thinks is already in full swing. So maybe eugenics isn’t quite so bad in comparison.

All I’m saying is that I’m not worried about the propagation of my bloodline. It could probably use some bleach, or at least antibiotics. And I’m not holding my breath on catching the last space flight out of Nuclear ‘Nam on Elon’s ark.

Or maybe all of this is just a convenient theory for me since a biological clock isn’t what makes me tick.

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