Evidence of Inbreeding Depression on Human Height, a paper with over 1,000 authors! (I exaggerate) It’s interesting because it seems to establish that inbreeding does have a deleterious effect on traits whose genetic architecture is presumably polygenic and additive. Why is this theoretically important? Because inbreeding depression is often assumed to be driven by the exposure of rare recessive larger effect alleles, which recombine in near relations. Using tens of thousands of individuals from across a dozen European nations the authors found that there is a consistent relationship between inbreeding and reduction in height.
As the authors note height is a convenient trait to explore. First, it’s highly heritable. 80 to 90 percent of the variation in the population is explained by variation in genes. Second, it’s easy to measure. Also, implicit in the paper is the fact that in Europe today there is far less of a environmental effect on height (that’s why the heritability value is high). Even in poor European nations most people have enough to eat, so height is highly heritable, allowing for appropriate cross-national comparison.
The simplest way to state their results is that all things being equal the offspring of two …