![]() ![]() As Richard Dawkins set out in " The Selfish Gene," animals want to pass on as many of their genes as possible. If animals are compelled to pass on their genes, you'd expect they'd prefer to produce offspring with a relative than to not reproduce at all.īut there could also be a more counter-intuitive reason behind some animal inbreeding. One obvious scenario in which animals mate with their relatives is when there's just no other option. So there are strong reasons for animals to avoid mating with a relative-but are there any situations where inbreeding might actually be beneficial? But when parents are related, there's a higher chance that both parents will carry the same unhealthy genes, which the offspring must then inherit. ![]() Usually, if a parent carries a gene for a rare genetic disease, the other parent will carry the healthy version of that gene, which is then expressed in their offspring. This happens because half of the offspring's genes come from each parent. Mating with a relative, on the other hand, increases the likelihood that parents will pass rare genetic diseases to their offspring. One of them is their degree of relatedness, but animals are also interested in the resources the partner can provide, and whether they carry desirable genes.Ĭhoosing an unrelated mate is attractive, seeing as it increases the genetic diversity of the resultant offspring. This may seem surprising or unsettling, but evolutionary theorists have pointed out for decades that inbreeding is not always bad-and that in some cases, for instance where mate choice is limited, it might even be beneficial.Īnimals account for a variety of factors when choosing a mate. We reviewed 40 years of scholarship on animal mate selection, and found that animals don't tend to differentiate between relatives and non-relatives when choosing a mate. We'd expect to see the same attitude extend to animals, who may lack a social distaste for incest but are, in the end, subject to the same biological pressures to produce the fittest offspring-which we assume means breeding with an unrelated mate.īut our recent study has called this assumption into question. ![]()
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