conuly

What I said to this person is that theoretically you could keep on inbreeding and, through amazing luck with your ancestors, hit the genetic lottery - long lifespan and good looks too!

In all seriousness I shudder to imagine the odds on that deal, it's gotta be worse than one-in-a-million, but if you pick your bottleneck very carefully it can't be absolutely impossible, right?

I think it's because they tend to combine a small amount of understanding of genetics with the incest taboo and squick. Even though a single generation of incest isn't actually genetically necessarily a risk to the children (unless you have good reason to believe your family carries a fairly dangerous recessive).

Yeah, I've never understood why some people honestly believe that if you fuck your sibling, half-sibling, first cousin you're going to end up with a four-armed baby. Genetics still doesn't work like that! It'd be funny if it did, in fact.