Inbreeding- Module 6.2

 

    One benefit of inbreeding I can think of is acquiring certain preferred traits. One common example of inbreeding that I can think of is with dogs. When a specific dog breed is wanted or specific traits unique to a particular dog, inbreeding could be used to acquire those. With that, the gene pool would be fairly small and there wouldn’t be many as much genetic diversity. This is when assortative mating would be more common. This is when the preference to choose mates with similar phenotypes increases.

    However, inbreeding also comes with many disadvantages. Recessive phenotypes could be more prominent with inbreeding, which could be a negative impact of the recessive trait is damaging. If too many recessive genes are inherited, they will be carriers for varying diseases. With that, there are many underlying health conditions that the animal would be predisposed to.

    I guess one factor of inbreeding in terms of evolution would be that if we were wanting an animal to adapt to a trait that is common within the family, then that animal would have to spend less time evolving. On the other hand, if the animal had to adapt to a trait that is not as common, it would spend more time evolving since its gene pool is very specific to its family.

Comments

  1. Jaden McDonaldMarch 12, 2021 at 8:38 PM

    Hi,
    I think you reasons for a population to want to inbreed are very good. I like how you connected it to something like dogs, which makes this very easy for anyone to understand. I also agree that one big disadvantage would be those recessive genes becoming more prominent because organisms in the population are inbreeding.

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