Esoteric Chat

It is commonly understood that there is a point where inbreeding is considered unethical. At this point where the inbreeding depression is too great it is called incest. There is also the reality of an outbreeding depression. Most people would think that it is only a problem if you have kids outside of your race. The reality is that the outbreeding depression begins when people start having children with someone more genetically distant than their 5th cousin. The optimal distance is 3rd cousins. This means that the genetic group people must stay within to remain fertile is 1st through 5th cousins. In the modern day the average person, no matter how ethnically homogenous their society, will have enough mobility and live in a large enough society that they will on average marry their 20th cousin. Over centuries of people becoming more mobile it has become impossible to avoid participating in abcest even if you marry someone in your home town. If you marry someone as close as a 1st-5th cousin it is likely that people would consider you incestuous. To abcestuous people everyone is incestuous.

the study

Edit:
the solution is probably just making sure you find out who your 1st-5th cousins are and people have to recognize that is the only group you should reproduce with. No more flying to Thailand. We simply don't know how important it is to know all of those people and would much less be concerned with tracking them down for reproductive purposes.

3rd cousins being optimal means that there are only 125 people you can have optimal genetic distance with assuming that everyone has 4 children (very generous). Currently with the average birthrate of 2 that comes out to be only 14 third cousins at optimal genetic distance to reproduce with.

so the takeaway from this is that we should be fucking our cousins…

based

Walter -

I see where you're going with this, but how is inbreeding (or outbreeding) unethical? What is the result of reproducing with someone that has more of a genetic distance than is considered optimal?

antichrist -

I fail to see any evidence that "outbreeding" leads to worse health or anything. Humans have lived in communities for a very long time. While this phenomenon may be exacerbated by modern transportation and cities, it's not new by any means…

The thing is that it leads to lower fertility because there is lower compatibility between chromosomes.
Incest leads to depression in fitness. Abcest leads to depression in fertility. It's a commonly understood phenomena how hybrids can't reproduce.
The difference here is that we're slowly becoming like mules. It's not happening in one generation.
Neither incest nor abcest lead to any complications within one generation most times.

I realized that I got the math and interpretation of data a bit wrong. Doesn't change the point of the statement.
If 3rd cousin is the optimal distance for fertility that means the outbreeding depression (abcest) begins with the 3rd cousin.
When the average number of children per family is 2 like it is currently the number of female 1st-3rd cousins is 41
When the average number of children per family is 7 like it was before steam powered transportation the number of female 1st-3rd cousins was 8,841
It is believable that before widespread transportation people were often accidentally breeding with third cousins.