Plant and animal breeders usually employ controlled positive assortative mating to increase the frequency of desirable traits and to reduce genetic variation in a population. In effect, they try to guide the direction of evolution by preventing some individuals from mating and encouraging others to do so. By doing this, farmers, in a sense are acting in the place of nature in selecting winners and losers in the competition for survival. This method has been used to develop purebred varieties of laboratory mice, dogs, horses, and other farm animals. The amount of time it takes for this process can be much shorter than one might imagine. If brothers and sisters are mated together every generation, it will only take 20 generations for all individuals in a family line to share 98+% of the same alleles—they essentially will be clones, and breeding results will be close to those resulting from self-fertilization. Commercially sold laboratory research mice have been mated brother to sister for 50-100 generations or more. The downside of this practice is that positive assortative mating results in an increase in homozygosity of harmful alleles if they are present in the gene pool. The high frequency of hip dysplasia click this icon to hear the preceding term pronounced, epilepsy click this icon to hear the preceding term pronounced, and immune-system malfunctions in some dog varieties are primarily a result of inbreeding. The reduction in viability and subsequent loss of reproductive potential of purebred varieties has been referred to as inbreeding depression. In contrast, animals that have been crossbred with mates from very different genetic lines are more likely to have lower frequencies of homozygous recessive conditions. Subsequently, they are liable to be more viable. This phenomenon has been referred to as hybrid vigor or heterosis click this icon to hear the preceding term pronounced.
Human mating rarely is as consistently positive assortative as is the case with purebred domesticated animals. As a consequence, inbreeding depression is rarely a problem except for some reproductively isolated small societies and subcultures. The Old Order Amish click this icon to hear the preceding term pronounced are an example. This relatively small population centered in Pennsylvania and Ohio has been self-isolated by their religious beliefs and lifestyle for more than two centuries. They mostly select mates from within their own communities, which results in positive assortative effects on their gene pool. The Amish population has a comparatively high frequency of Ellis-van Creveld syndrome click this icon to hear the preceding term pronounced, which is a genetically inherited disorder characterized by dwarfism, extra fingers, and malformations of the arms, wrists, and heart. The majority of the known cases in the world of this rare syndrome have been found among the Amish, and 7% of them carry the responsible recessive autosomal allele.