(07-18-2013, 05:51 PM)Callipygian Wrote: It's not so much immunity as it is a matter of prevalence. If you breed out a disease like cystic fibrosis, it no longer exists, thus isn't a concern. There will always be a few carriers, but you may bump that number down from an average individual carrying seven deadly alleles to an average individual carrying one or two.
"Immunity" brings up a good point, though. One of the other major costs when it comes to in-breeding is communicable diseases. In-breeding reduces diversity. If a strain of a disease like the flu comes along that is especially infectious, it will spread through the population in no time because everyone's immune systems will be essentially the same. This is a major threat posed today to our crops and livestock as in-breeding is an essential technique in the development of domesticated species. As stated earlier, it's the fastest way to increase the prevalence of a desired trait like increased size or crop yield.
In Eorzea, virulent diseases become a non-issue due to the prevalence of Esuna. This further swings the argument in favor of in-breeding being not terribly detrimental to Miqo'te society.
If this sort of science interests you, I would suggest reading The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley. He makes the entire concept very readable, even if you aren't a biologist.
Just to clarify, I understood it wasn't quite an immunity after your explanation. ^^
Prior to it, I wasn't sure if there was a realistic way to play around with genes to get a similar effect, so I wondered if perhaps Square Enix planned on giving it a "Because magic reasons!" explanation. But it seems that's not the case, thankfully. I like some mode of realism in my fiction to make it believable (just like, say, we might be able to use some sort of wide-spread occurrence of testosterone-intolerance to explain why most Miqo'te are female).
As for disease and infection, I was getting a bit worried that we might have another problem on our hands until you mentioned Esuna! People on the beta forums kept saying it was a bad spell, not knowing it's likely the sole thing keeping our precious catgirls/boys a legitimate, functional society.
I only hope that some illness that causes Weakness doesn't turn out to be a contagious effect down the line. Esuna doesn't seem to work on that :\
Also: I'll definitely save that and give it at read at some point. Biology seems to come up a lot as far as different fictional races are concerned, so it's always good to have some information to work with. Thank you ;3
