"My point was only that inbreeding leads to degeneration while carefully constructed hybrid lines can be far superior to the wild type. In the video, Brother Adam says: "

I have to take issue with such a generality.  There exist robust, healthy mice so inbred you can do skin transplants between any two individuals and get the graft accepted.  Some plants, soy beans and tomatoes for instance are extremely inbred.  I have four lines of tomatoes I have propagated side by side for 25 years.  They never exhibit any evidence at all of anything besides selfing.  It is also the case that brother to sister matings very often result in total or near total sterility by the third generation.  Both rabbits and pigeons exhibit such behavior.  In corn breeding it is well recognized that hybrid vigor does not always occur when crossing two highly inbred lines.  There are many examples of crosses where the F1 hybrids are much weaker than either parent or even lethal at the embryo stage.  This is particularly true in species crosses.  In some such cases the F1 is little improved in vigor over either parent.  While most people who have not taken a hard look at the  negative effects of inbreeding and the positive effects of out crossing inbred lines think it is a simple matter of deleterious homozygous recessive protein coding genes the professionals do not know what causes hybrid vigor.  What they do know is  most of it and perhaps all of it has nothing to do with protein coding genes.

Brother Adam lived in the time when hybrid crosses were the rage.  What he did with bees fits very well with what many others did with many other species.  Largely he was simply following the crowd.  He followed the crowd very well and did enough crosses to find a few that worked very well.  He worked very hard at it which is the usual formula for success no matter what approach you take.

Dick

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