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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28901 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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How much of the educational gap is due to IQ differences, how much of those IQ differences is due to inbreeding depression, and how quickly does a population begin to recover from inbreeding depression?

Islamic cousin marriage declining can plausibly lead to higher educational attainment for the next generation, at least so it seems.

Cousin marriage is more common in Turkey than in Europe, but much less common than it is in eg. Pakistan.

Apparently inbreeding is not necessarily a problem if the input population is healthy enough, because it just reinforces existing traits. Goats, for an example that's easily accessible to me, will almost inevitably make new goats with their siblings if left to their own devices without much trouble

But if you're starting with unhealthy goats, whew boy

Note that inbreeding itself is a good way of weeding out harmful-in-homozygous alleles via increased homozygosity, so in a population that's been doing inbreeding for ages you'd expect such a reduction in inbreeding depression.

you also lose alleles that are actually beneficial in heterozygous combination this way

The other issue is genes which are adaptive when you have a single alelle but maladaptive when you have both. Sickle cell disease is the clearest example I can think of--people with both alelles have sickle cell disease, but people with just one alelle don't have any symptoms of the disease and are much better at surviving malaria.

I expect there are countless such genes with greater and lesser effects and incest brings them all out. The reverse is also true, perhaps the population will be benefitted by increased prevalence of certain genes, but the prior should be that any given mutation is more likely to be harmful than helpful.

I wonder if such recovery is even happening in Germany.

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