this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
184 points (96.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36172 readers
528 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Just to be well and truly fuckin clear. I am not now nor have I ever been nor will I ever be contemplating shagging a family member.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TheBananaKing 74 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Swiss cheese theory.

Genes code for all the differnet protein molecules in your body; if any of them are damaged, they don't produce that particular protein and your body is all messed up.

This is bad. Luckily, you have two strands of DNA, one from either parent - and a copy of each gene on either strand. If the copy of the gene you need on strand A is broken, no problem, you just use the copy from strand B (or vice-versa).

However, this relies on both strands having all their broken bits in different places.

Think of a slice of swiss cheese - if you need 100% cheese cover on your sandwich, and you have two randomly-selected pieces of swiss cheese, all the holes are going to be in different places, and you'll probably be fine. Maybe there'll be a couple of tiny gaps, but you'll probably get by.

However, if both slices come from right next to each other n the same block, then most if not all the holes are going to line up with each other, and you are fucked.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (4 children)

If you had to repopulate the earth from a mass population decline... Would cloning better or inbreeding?

Cloning would avoid swiss cheese problems?

[–] RogueGallifreyan 18 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Cloning would be worse!

Cloning creates identical people with identical DNA. Identical DNA, identical defects, repeated over and over through the colony of twins, triplets, etc…

But it’s a small margin of improvement. Both cases, if the population pool is too small, you’ll eventually end up with sterility, severe mutations, and very early deaths, end of colony within a few generations.

[–] DrQuint 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If we had a massive population decline, yet, we did not have a global infrastructure collapse (so, magic instant death) then I believe some of the survivors would pretty quickly realize they need yo go find the cold storage of tons of semen samples.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Ah yes, mad max but not fighting over oil.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Wow. Never heard of this. I'll ad it to my distopian watch list

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If the total population of a species falls below a certain threshold, that species is doomed due to low genetic diversity.

One last-ditch attempt would be to interbreed with a closely-related species, so the best (as in, has a .001% chance of working) option in this case might be to locate a willing chimp.

[–] TexasDrunk 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Tiny chance of working, plus even if it did the offspring may be sterile. So people would just be out there fucking chimps for no reason.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Don't crush their dreams, man

[–] TheBananaKing 1 points 10 months ago

It would delay them I guess, but unless you plan to clone everyone forever, it wouldn't be a longterm fix. The genepool wouldn't get any bigger, so once your population did breed, you'd have the same problem.