Also I suspect that most of the posts on r/inbreeding are fictional. The “niece” and “uncle” have identical writing styles, for one.
Redditors discussing "Is the threat of inbreeding exaggerated?" is it true?
Submitted 4 weeks ago by الله@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/99651292-4cba-4e10-9b54-8e9c9e23d299.png
Comments
EponymousBosh@awful.systems 4 weeks ago
akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
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?
slazer2au@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Welcome to the internet.
unmagical@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
الله@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
what type of nose is that?
unmagical@lemmy.ml 4 weeks 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.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I rarely complain about voting, but it annoys the fuck out of me that this question is in the negative. It’s actually a damn good question
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 4 weeks ago
If you have two siblings from a set of well mixed parents, the odds are likely lower because it is likely that only one parent had the gene at issue.
However, the taboo of marrying siblings and first cousins are usually cultural, which means the likelihood of both parents having the same gene which will cause a genetic issue. So, if you have a human population with a smaller overall gene pool and/or families where intermarriage within a family is high, the odds of genetic disease from familial interbreeding spikes.
EponymousBosh@awful.systems 4 weeks ago
Genetically, as someone else pointed out, it’s not a huge problem as an occasional thing. Ethically? It gets dicey.
glasratz@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
Well, ethically it depends entirely on the civilization.
SharkWeek@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
Just to chip in, I had a friend who was married and had a kid before finding out him and his wife were cousins.
The kid was smart and good looking, so it worked out well enough, but they didn’t have any more kids, lol
sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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.
crandlecan@mander.xyz 4 weeks ago
Which family line showed this one? :)
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 4 weeks ago
Not necessarily. If the problem is on a recessive gene or it isn’t a problem with only one out of two genes expressing the trait, the genetic disease won’t get bred out of the family.