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
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.
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.
Which family line discovered this one? :)
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.
Also I suspect that most of the posts on r/inbreeding are fictional. The “niece” and “uncle” have identical writing styles, for one.
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.
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?
Welcome to the internet.
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, if poorly phrased.
But it’s true. Inbreeding takes generations to cause significant troubles if there’s no really nasty genetic diseases present already.
Even siblings aren’t going to crank out two headed monsters if they’re the first in the family to keep it in the family. And, once you’re past first cousins, the risks get even lower. Not non existent, just not anything to worry about in the first generation. Again, that’s unless there’s a known issue.
Oh they down bad.
what type of nose is that?
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.
The result of inbreeding
The obvious workaround is fuck’em outdoors!
Genetically, as someone else pointed out, it’s not a huge problem as an occasional thing. Ethically? It gets dicey.
Well, ethically it depends entirely on the civilization.
