[Dragaera] Breaking the Cycle - Genetic Purity

[Howard Brazee]

On 8/29/2006 6:25 PM Philip Hart wrote:
>  Hard to say what "not many" means, but there are diseases like sickle
>  cell
>  anaemia or CF or Tay-Sachs which are (may be?) the result of
>  heterozygous
>  advantage in an adverse environment (malaria, cholera, TB) - having
>  one
>  incompletely recessive allele may be helpful (or mostly helpful), but
>  some
>  get two.
>
>
>  Also, we haven't been under normal natural selection pressure for a
>  while...

For various values of "normal".   The big change will be when we 
actually manipulate genes, and there are too many advantages for this to 
not happen in a big way.

Which brings us back to Dragaera.   We know manipulation has been 
done.   The funny part of their genetic history is that multiple houses 
converged creating the 17 Dragarean (not to mention other) identifiable 
separate genetic houses.    I can easily see that mixed-breeds would not 
form new houses, but would move into the 17.    Things are different 
there - for a purpose.