Hi,
And they show up in the most widely unrelated breedings too.
It's a mutation - they happen randomly all the time. Some are good, some are irrelevant and some are bad, some stand alone and some only present in combination.
Everything you say in the first paragraph is true of every single breeding of every single organism since life began.
Perhaps if you told the person you are selling to exactly how much line or inbreeding you did with that animal they would be responsible enough to make an informed decision - of course the people you bought it from would also have had to tell you that same information. And mother nature would have to tell the guy who collected it or it's parents from the wild of course for any of that to be properly placed in context. You cannot claim moral authority that only you can determine what is an acceptable level of line or inbreeding when you know no more about your animals genetic history than joe blow buying one form a pet store. Sorry to be so blunt but that is the Gods honest truth.
The animal you linebreed to prove out the trait could have been inbred sib to sib in the wild for the last 300 generations for all you know.
Your second paragraph just denied that there has been any advantage to farming and agriculture since that began either.
Oh and superdwarf retics, dwarf burms, loacality boas, galapagos tortoises and darwins finches are also apparently "no good" using that argument - any island or otherwise isolated population by your logic should be full of deformed and sicky animals.
Perhaps you can explain to me why this is not the case in reality?
Backbreeding does indeed have fewer risks as it has a significantly higher chance of having more differences in the genetic makeup than sib to sib so each individual gene has a smaller chance of being expressed. But both happen very, very often in nature and have driven evolution to the point it is currently at.
And to accurately evaluate those specific risks we would need to know considerably more about the ball python geneome than we currently do.
You are perfectly free to continue to try and convince people not to linebreed or inbreed their animals - I'm simply showing you that the evidence does not entirely support your assertions. Your claims that the evidence and research supports you is utter, utter bunk.
For example go research mitochondrial eve. (here and here are a few links to get you started ).
But I don't think interbeeding (line or inbreeding ) is happening to the extent you mention on any noticable scale within the hobby in any case.
There will be a few examples but it is hardly common - we are not all hatching out hundreds of frankensnakes every year.
Time will tell if you are a true seer of future problems or tilting at windmills. At this time we simply do not know enough to tell.
Again, if the problem is already in the animals genetic makeup inbreeding or linebreeding will increase the chances of expressing it. If it isn't then it won't.
dr del
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