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Why does incest result in birth defects? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 4 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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

Cloning would avoid swiss cheese problems?

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years 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.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Ah yes, mad max but not fighting over oil.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years 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.

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