Hello,
just for personal interest I'd like to ask how exactly incest is causing so many problems for animals. I'm aware of the leg up, sexual reproduction is giving you, resulting in diverse offspring and maintaining a diversity of genes.
But on the other hand there are a lot of species and most of bacteria using asexual reproduction with no or little penalty. I'm not talking about inbreeding being the only option (like the clownfish male can turn female to mate with it's offsprings if the former female is killed)
This issue started to bother me when I read articles about abiogenesis hypotheses. Most of them are agreeing on the idea that life started most likely once and not over and over. Hence afte the first DNA formed the genetic pool was very limited. Would parthogenesis as the perfect incest have been such a problem, life wouldn't exist today.
I didn't find anything via Google, so I'd like to know if you can enlighten me about this.
1.) While I understand that sexual reproduction arose to increase genetic diversity, I don't get why animals haven't developed a biological mechanism to avoid inbreeding problems like plants. (quote: A small non-coding RNA mediates such differences in dominance as part of a system that prevents inbreeding in plants.)
2.) If inbreeding is such a problem for many species who normally reproduce by sexual means, how could those evolve and not become extinct?
3.) Can you break it down for me what exactly it is that is causing problems when inbreeding while parthogenesis seems to work perfectly fine?
Quick Reply
