No Stupid Questions

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.

Also I suspect that most of the posts on r/inbreeding are fictional. The "niece" and "uncle" have identical writing styles, for one.

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?

Oh they down bad.

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.

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.

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

Genetically, as someone else pointed out, it's not a huge problem as an occasional thing. Ethically? It gets dicey.