Stockholm university

Incest isn’t a taboo in the animal kingdom – new study

Reviewing studies of 88 species, researchers found little evidence that animals avoid inbreeding.

Inbreeding. Article from the Conversation
Photo from the article in The Conversation. Credit to Kletr/Shutterstock

The article is published on May 18 and is written by Regina Vega Trejo, researcher at the Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, and Raïssa de Boer, researcher and computer scientist at Lund University.

They write:
“We humans tend to regard incest as deeply disturbing. It’s a strong social taboo, and it’s underpinned by sound biological reasoning. Mixing genes with a non-relative is beneficial because it increases genetic diversity, while genetic defects often occur in the offspring of related parents.

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.

But our recent study has called this assumption into question. 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.”

Read the article published in The Conversation:
https://theconversation.com/incest-isnt-a-taboo-in-the-animal-kingdom-new-study-160937

Read more about the collaboration between Stockholm University and The Conversation and how to pitch an article idea: https://www.su.se/staff/services/information-communication/pitch-an-article-idea-for-the-conversation-1.462268

More articles in The Conversation by researchers at Stockholm University: https://theconversation.com/institutions/stockholm-university-1019

 

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