Why does incest result in birth defects? - eviltoast

Just to be well and truly fuckin clear. I am not now nor have I ever been nor will I ever be contemplating shagging a family member.

  • jet@hackertalks.com
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    9 months ago

    If you had to repopulate the earth from a mass population decline… Would cloning better or inbreeding?

    Cloning would avoid swiss cheese problems?

    • RogueGallifreyan@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Cloning would be worse!

      Cloning creates identical people with identical DNA. Identical DNA, identical defects, repeated over and over through the colony of twins, triplets, etc…

      But it’s a small margin of improvement. Both cases, if the population pool is too small, you’ll eventually end up with sterility, severe mutations, and very early deaths, end of colony within a few generations.

    • DrQuint@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      If we had a massive population decline, yet, we did not have a global infrastructure collapse (so, magic instant death) then I believe some of the survivors would pretty quickly realize they need yo go find the cold storage of tons of semen samples.

    • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      If the total population of a species falls below a certain threshold, that species is doomed due to low genetic diversity.

      One last-ditch attempt would be to interbreed with a closely-related species, so the best (as in, has a .001% chance of working) option in this case might be to locate a willing chimp.

    • TheBananaKing@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      It would delay them I guess, but unless you plan to clone everyone forever, it wouldn’t be a longterm fix. The genepool wouldn’t get any bigger, so once your population did breed, you’d have the same problem.