I was wondering if anyone had any information about hillbillies and 'inbreeding' as it would interest to find out if it was true that 'hillbillies' do inbreed.
anything would be useful
thank you

google appalachia and genetic

Go to eastern Kentucky. Bunch of hicks out there. We had to drive through there to get to Wash.DC once. People there are freakin' blue.

WTF: why would you even care\?

trying to find long lost parents?

haha this is in pseudoscience.

come to Cheshire, UK

Tones of it

most people's families have lived in a village of 100 or so people for about 10 generations. They're all freaks

Can't tell you about hillbillies, but inbreeding that ocurred in at least one of the Chinese dynasties resulted in children that were born with tails as the mutation supposedly spawned from the genetic traits of early ancestors of humans, or possibly developed on their own. But, I don't remeber a source, so if you don't want to belive me, I don't really care. I'm too tired to anyway.

Damn, those Chinese were actually, DEVOLVING!

Pi-Sudoku Okay, I was going to be snotty and find some pics of people from Cheshire just to prove you wrong, but, and this is a true story, when I googled Cheshire, THIS is what came up. I about died laughing thinking "Oh my god! Sudoku was right!!!"

http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/3812/cheshire13rk.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Make a sweet avatar, thats for sure.

most people's families have lived in a village of 100 or so people for about 10 generations. They're all freaks
I don't see why that would lead to more genetic problems.
Primates and early humans all bred in very tiny groups, no?

And if often could lead to genetic problems. Inbreeding doesn't lead to genetic problems because it inherently creates more mutations, it creates problems because it allows traits that are both recessive and rare to combine more often to actually be expressed in the phoenotype. In early humans this was not a problem. If a child had a birth defect or a genetic defect of almost any sort, he most likely would not have lived very long. So those problems took care of themselves. Not so today.

-AntonK

If thats the case ^^^ it would mean that inbreeding actually speeds up evolutionary change considerably, and thus may be beneficial to the species over a long period of time.