Talk:Inbreeding
From Academic Kids
How about merging this article with the endogamy article? Maybe the inclusion of the Ashkenazim, also.
Moved this here.
- Inbreeding also occurs in humans. For example, Japan is one of the most endogenous societies in the world.
It doesn't seem clear to me that 1) Japan is more endogenous than say Iceland and 2) this can be regarded as inbreeding since the rate of genetic and health problems in Japan isn't higher than the rest of the world.
I don't care who is singled out but I do need at least one example of it in humans.
From the link I gave:
One of the most endogenous societies in the world, Japan has approved of incestuous marriages in court circles even in historical times.(152) Preferred sibling, cousin, uncle-niece and aunt-nephew marriages have been so extensive that genetics experts have discovered that the inbreeding has affected their size and health.(153) How often this incestuous marriage system occurred in traditional Japan is still largely unexplored. One indication of what is likely to be found is a 1959 study by Kubo showing that there were still rural areas in Japan where fathers married their daughters when the mother had died or was incapacitated, "in accordance with feudal family traditions.(154) Kubo concluded that incest was considered "praiseworthy conduct" in many traditional rural families. In the 36 incest cases he studied in Hiroshima, he found that there was often community moral disapproval of the families who lived in open incestuous marriages, but that the participants themselves did not think of it as immoral. In fact, when the father was unavailable to head the family, his son often took over his role and had sex with his sister in order "to end confusion in the order of the home." Other members of the family accepted this incest as normal.
1) Consider the possibility that you can't find an example because there isn't one.
2) Japan has a population of 150 million. Finding a few dozen or even a few thousand cases of incest isn't near enough to label the population as inbreed.
No way. Incest is very prevalent in Japan. It's a question of finding a population that's inbred.
There should be something about inbreedding depression, and perhaps something about breeding culture with animals, where they recommend an inbreeding coefficient around 1-5% as far as I remember. Outbred isn't always recommended.
This whole paragraph needs rewriting:
- The only really major problem with inbreeding is that two closely related individuals are likely to have very similar genomes, and if one individual has a gene for a given negative trait, then the other is likely to have it as well. It is pretty complex, and I would spew numbers, but I'm sure any reasonably intelligent person can figure it out for themselves with a basic knowledge of Gregor Mendel and his plant breeding experiments. Suffice it to say that a single instance of inbreeding is statistically very unlikely to result in a flawed individual.
-- The Anome 09:09, Jan 26, 2005 (UTC)
