Why does same family mating develop mutated offspring?
In: Biology
It doesn’t really cause mutations. What it does do is increase the chance for existing mutations in the parents to be reinforced in the offspring. Every person (or sexually-reproducing organism) receives one set of genes from their mother and another redundant set from their father. Many potentially harmful mutations are harmless if the organism also has a good copy of the same gene.
So, if the mother and father are related, there is a chance to get two copies of a bad gene. This is less likely if the parents were unrelated.
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