{"id":72793,"date":"2012-07-22T21:23:30","date_gmt":"2012-07-23T05:23:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=17465"},"modified":"2012-07-22T21:23:30","modified_gmt":"2012-07-23T05:23:30","slug":"what-is-inbreeding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/07\/22\/what-is-inbreeding\/","title":{"rendered":"What is inbreeding?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve put up a bunch of posts relating to inbreeding recently (<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2012\/07\/ashkenazi-jews-are-not-inbred-2\/\">1<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2012\/07\/ashkenazi-jews-are-not-inbred\/\">2<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2012\/07\/cousin-marriage-can-reduce-i-q-a-lot\/\">3<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2012\/07\/inbred-shorter-people\/\">4<\/a>). <strong>But I haven&#8217;t really defined it<\/strong>. First, let&#8217;s stipulate what inbreeding is not: it is not the same as <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Incest\">incest<\/a>. Acts of incest can include individuals who have no blood relationship to each other (e.g., <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hamlet\">Hamlet<\/a>). Additionally, there are instances of inbreeding which are not necessarily incestuous. If a population is highly inbred, then individuals who are not relations by social custom may still be so genetically similar to a point where the pairing can not credibly be stated as an outcross. But still, what do I mean? To refresh myself I re-read the section on inbreeding in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0878933085\/geneexpressio-20http%3A\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0878933085\/geneexpressio-20\">Hartl &amp; Clark<\/a>. And I think that helped clarify one implicit assumption which I have which may not be clear to everyone, and I&#8217;ll get to that.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, first, what&#8217;s the deal with inbreeding? The short answer is that inbreeding is a measure of the probability of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Identical_by_descent\">identity by descent<\/a> of two <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Allele\">alleles<\/a> at a given <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Locus_(genetics)\">locus<\/a> in a given individual. This concise definition itself is the problem. These are all abstract concepts, close to being &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/CccM2XpJ5kc\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve put up a bunch of posts relating to inbreeding recently (1, 2, 3, 4). But I haven&#8217;t really defined it. First, let&#8217;s stipulate what inbreeding is not: it is not the same as incest. Acts of incest can include individuals who have n&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[460,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inbreeding","category-population-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72793"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72901,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72793\/revisions\/72901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}