- Apr 7, 2020
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I believe there is a limit number in population where genetic stagnation doesn't become critical. Yet marring your sister or daughter will sooner then later drive your bloodline to disaster. We have, fori instance, as storical proof, the royal line of Akhenaton and of his son Tutankhamon who were a mess of genetic inherited deformities and chronical conditions.Again, in the course of history, there have existed many villages (or even entire countries, like Iceland or Greenland) of maybe a couple hundred indviduals living at the same time. Some of these villages were so isolated that they also mostly married inside the village. And I would even say that, within such villages, there existed certain social classes and people would even try to marry within their social class (e.g. farmers marrying farmers and labourers marrying labourers) thus even further limiting the gene pool. Of course, sometimes a stranger would wander in and provide some much needed fresh blood, but still. Such villages also survived and thrived for centuries.
Ideal? Probably not, but still viable.
I believe there have been tribal societies were inbreed was considered ok and casually praticated, but sure those societies didn't became wide sistemic traditions due to the aformentioned genetic limitations.
Going back to the game, the Zetan community seems more just very liberal that openly based on inbreed. So that a father might even sleep with his daughters or similar situation, but eventually those daughter will marry someone else and mostly have children with someone not blood related or at least, not so close.
Marring (mostly) distant cousins in arranged marriages seems to be a thing even today in some part of the world with no big conseguences (genetically speaking).