Talk:Inbreeding

I notice that linebreeding in our article is presented in vague terms as some less intensive form of inbreeding, as if there are no real distinction between the two concepts. All participants and executors of the merge discussion in 2011 which lead (essentially) to the present formulations also seemed to share this opinion (see Talk:Inbreeding/Archive_1#Merge proposal). However, the two reliable sources given in the section present line breeding as a fundamentally different concept, which however often results in inbreeding as a side effect. Briefly, the purpose of line breeding is described to be spreading a new or rare treat in a broader population; an example is employing a 'champion' bull with genes for high milk production for insemination of a very large number of cows. As noted in a source, this would not in itself cause tangible inbreeding problems; but it is in practice doing it, and very much so when the same champion also is used also for insemination of his doughters and doughter's dougters. The illustration (which also was fetched from the old linebreed article stub, see its last stand-alone version) discusses this extreme (but seemingly not that uncommon) practice; unhappily, the merge executor replaced "linebreeding" with "inbreeding" in the title, making it rather pointless. (This was quite possibly due to misunderstanding the issue.)

There is now also another reference to a blog article, giving a vague explanation more similar to the one in our article, added here (in response to a {{cn}}, I suppose). However, that source should not be considered as reliable, and I'll remove it. (It is not really necessary; the content of that sentence is more or less covered by the other two sources; and to some extent may be due to just misunderstandings.) The source was produced (under a "blog" heading) on 20 December 2023 by the pseudonym admin-science; the same day the same pseudonym produced 3012 long posts under a heading "articles". The AI (yes, AI's are mentioned elsewhere on that website, https://scienceofbiogenetics.com) may very well have employed precisely this wikipedia article as one main component in its text composition; this is hard to say, since the "blog article" essentially lacks sources.

@Ronald Sexton: I applaude your general work with adding sources to wp articles, and believe that the addition of this one was just an accidence. However, if you have a blacklist of some kind for unrealiable sources, I recommend that you add scienceofbiogenetics.com to it (Nota bene: I am not an enemy of all employment of computer assistance in article production, and draw no red line at using AI (even if I myself never employ it). However, these AI-produced articles are quite bad for our purposes. I looked at a few of the articles under the heading "articles"; and found some extremely badly executed attempts at producing references. This AI was not very "intelligent", and nor prohibited from openly fabulating. This mass production was made over 25 months ago, and I suspect that AI is smarter today - at least if a user demands it.) However, if you disagree with me (also after having glanced at a few of the scienceofbiogenetics.com articles), then please explain why here!

A potential problem is that I may be completely wrong (not about scienceofbiogenetics.com, but about linebreeding). Honestly, I've not noted this concept before today, when I saw it contrasted to inter alia inbreeding in the article outbreeding. Thus, I'm not at all sure that the vague meaning suggested in wp does not reflect a usage of this term. What I can see is that the two given reliable sources (of which the FAO one should be considered as very authoritative) define the concept in a manner motivating a thorough revision of this section; and possibly also a re-split to a separate article. (Since either "the sense" or "one major sense" of linebreeding concerns a procedure for spreading some genes, which in practice but not in theory at least after a few generations normally involves tangible inbreeding in the sense given in our article, and sometimes extreme such, it is clear that "linebreeding" should be treated in the "inbreeding" article, but not necessarily in all its details. Besides, both sources do treat linebreading as a kind of inbreeding, although not of the usual sort.)

Thus, I for now will leave the redir and the section mostly intact (apart from removing the blog reference and restoring the image caption). Hopefully, there are some editors with vastly more knowledge about animal breeder's terminology than I have, who have this high-importance article on their watchlists. Thus, I have good hope of others fixing this - or at least responding to my concerns. If nothing happens in a few weeks time, I'll try to make a revision of the section, largely leaning on the two reliable sources already present. JoergenB (talk) 20:08, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

Ear incest al ~2026-15097-36 (talk) 00:23, 10 March 2026 (UTC)