Wait a minute. I was just trying to choose whether to have chocolate or vanilla pudding while casually checking Lemmy. How did I go from almost choosing chocolate to finding out that there are people openly chitchatting about impregnating their daughter with the same tone as if they were talking about what they had for breakfast?
Redditors discussing "Is the threat of inbreeding exaggerated?" is it true?
Submitted 2 hours ago by الله@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/99651292-4cba-4e10-9b54-8e9c9e23d299.png
Comments
akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 hours ago
unmagical@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
الله@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
what type of nose is that?
unmagical@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
That’s a member of the Habsburg family. Known for generations of inbreeding.
There’s also the blue Fugates of Kentucky if you want another example of why limiting your gene pool is bad.
EponymousBosh@awful.systems 1 hour ago
Also I suspect that most of the posts on r/inbreeding are fictional. The “niece” and “uncle” have identical writing styles, for one.
EponymousBosh@awful.systems 2 hours ago
Genetically, as someone else pointed out, it’s not a huge problem as an occasional thing. Ethically? It gets dicey.
glasratz@feddit.org 21 minutes ago
Well, ethically it depends entirely on the civilization.
sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
The thing about inbreeding is that it isn’t an instantly bad problem. The Habsburg dynasty was all about doing the nasty with cousins for a number of generations. It took a few rounds before the Habsburg Chin developed. Records also indicate that sister marriage was a common royal practice in pharonic Egypt.
It’s all a matter of probabilities and compounding problems. The first generation of inbred kids will probably turn out ok. With the second generation things can start getting sketchy. The more generations you go, the more likely you are to get Crimson Tide fans.
This is also why populations under a certain size can be problematic. When the family trees of a population start looking like brambles, problems start sticking out like thorns.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
It gets worse over time but it also eventually gets better, after the deleterious recessive alleles have been eliminated. Like in herd animals where a herd has only one breeding male per generation, so every generation is half-siblings.
The general rule is that a population with a fixed degree of inbreeding will have a corresponding number of deleterious alleles so that the selection pressure balances out; but when you change the degree of inbreeding, you get a spike in expressed mutations until things balance out again.