More Awesome Than You!

I did this just to find out if it was possible.  I got a set of boy-girl twins taken by the social worker then got them adopted into different families.

As children they were friends, as teens they fell in love and went steady. As young adults in college they got engaged. As adults they married and are now expecting their first kid.

I'm amazed I was able to do this. The genetics should be interesting to say the least.

And this is the problem with the was EAxis handles adoption and family markers. The few times I've had adoption scenarios, I've gone back and fixed their family trees and relationship types.

However, it is kind of hilarious in an Appalachian way.

Incest. A game for all the family.

Oh you have just given me a brilliant idea...thanks.  What is the easiest and quickest way to get children taken away?  I was thinking about walling them off and starving them...since social workers can walk through walls and all.  Or if children, just not have them do their homework for a while?

Oh spare us Tristan and Isolde (and Gotterdammerung)

Easy to get brats removed. Just ignore their every need
 ;)

I kind of wish there would be genetic effects for inbreeding. My experiment just made the kids look more and more like the vampire father of each generation, though oddly enough the female twin of the last generation has the throwback brown eyes of her aunt-slash-great-grandmother, while all the others have ended up with the blue eyes of the vampire.

Why would there be genetic effects for inbreeding?

O_o because there are in real life?

This reminds me of an episode of House. Two neighbor kids fell in love and ran away to be together. It turns out that they are half siblings.

that is why, whenever a family of children are taken by a social worker.  I have them all adopted by the same parents.

Keeping the children together. :)

Oddly, inbreeding sims seems like a good strategy to keep all the horrible deformities of EAxis-designed sims out of the family.  Too much non-selective breeding with the townies would make all of my towns look like Innsmouth.

After several generations of inbreeding, there is an increased occurance of traits caused by recessive genes, which may or may not be deterimental.  While inbreeding is a universal cultural taboo for good reasons, one occurance of incestuous reproduction isn't going to net anyone a three eyed baby or anything.

Exactly. I suppose it depends on what Swiftgold meant by "genetic effects", but it's a common myth that inbreeding causes defects. It doesn't. It just reduces genetic variability and brings out any defects that may already be present in the bloodline. Given the fact that sims don't have any defective genes, there's no reason for inbreeding to affect them at all.

When it comes to people, inbreeding is not an especially good idea.  The polygamist group in Texas that has been in the news is comprised largely of three families--Jeffs, Jessops, and Barlows--who have been marrying each other for decades.  As a result, they have a problem with a rare genetic disorder called fumarase deficiency, which probably would not have been a problem with a larger gene pool. 

Sims are a different can of worms entirely and I don't see much point in being squicked by close relationships between them.  That's an interesting experiment.  I hadn't thought of that.

PB

The unlucky ones will still fade away unfortunately, but the family can still survive well as long as the society and its other members don't play the "saint" and penalise the involved and the unlucky ones.

Incest also tends to do some screwing up in the head. (Or at least be a sign of some screwing up in the head that's already there.) But that's on more of a psychological level, and we know Sims are screwed in the head anyway.

Actually, inbreeding like that can cause very serious defects, because it drastically increases the chances of those defects occurring in offspring. It isn't a myth, but it isn't guaranteed that it will happen, either, and the chances just keep increasing the more you do it. It's possible that the offspring will be perfectly fine, yes, but it's also possible that the inbreeding will cause problems.

nil: wtf were you trying to say there?

That his/her last name is Jessop and he/she is from Texas?  What are you saying, nil?

o_O  I don't know what society you live among, but the society I live in doesn't think it's too cool to just let the unlucky ones "fade away".  It actually spends quite a bit of money to try to treat them, because that's more, y'know, humane.  What's more, recessive genes don't disappear from the pool, even if you repeatedly euthanise the afflicted.  Healthy children can inherit defective genes "silently" and pass them on.

Incest as a one-time case isn't the end of the world, but society has a pretty justifiable interest in discouraging it as a practice.

See, for me, the word "cause" means that the defects didn't exist beforehand. Which wrong. Inbreeding doesn't produce defects ex nihilo or damage genes in any way. It selects for already-existing genes. Breeding with the wrong person who *isn't* related can produce the same effects.

Recessive genes don't "disappear", but it IS possible to exterminate them, and quite quickly, if you set your mind to it. If you euthanise anyone afflicted with the problem, you will be applying selective pressure against that gene. If you extend this to sterilizing all of their relatives as well, either with or without testing for the gene's presence, regardless of whether they express the problem or not the problem will go away quite quickly. In the absence of selective pressure, however, gene frequencies will remain the same. With an obviously defective gene like this, allowing the afflicted to reproduce has extreme detrimental effects on the gene pool.

This is true but if you have lots of gene variability, i.e. a big population which breeds widely, the chances of meeting a person with exactly the same genetic defect as you becomes very small.  Generally, their issues are different from yours. ;) An isolated population with few members meets the same genetic defects within itself, over and over.


Natural selection only applies pressure to those who express the defective gene, which is why I didn't discuss extermination of all relatives.  :D  The key is really the relatives who don't express the defect.  Your selection pressure would have to be thorough, and certain, that none of the relatives had escaped, otherwise the recessive gene can silently multiply again...  dun dun dun

He'd likely have to kill us all too if what he was aiming for was eliminating 'bad' genes.  Mind you, I can quite see that that is what he'd want.

This actually happened to a UK couple in real life this year. They were separated at birth, met, 3-bolts, fell in love, got married. But I don't think they had children together.

Pity Sims don't have two-headed brats. Predictably enough the twins had twins (yawn) I really hate the puter at times.

Apropos of which, is there any way to change a surname for mac-using peasants like myself? I can't warm to "Subject" as a last name (yes, Nervous was one of the adopting parents)

Yeah, the only effects the Sims can end up with are That Horrible Nose or That Hideous Jawline. If there were other things they inherited it might be more interesting, but...

I assume you can still use the lot debugger? JM added a function for renaming sims, but you have to have the testing cheats enabled and shift-click on the box. You rename the sim to what you want the last name to be, then tell it to copy the first name to the surname, then give them a new first name again.