Re: minimal sustainable human gene pool?
- From: "Alan Meyer" <ameyer2@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:12:46 -0500 (EST)
<shoemakerted@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:fichdm$90q$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Any ideas about the smallest possible human gene pool that is
sustainable?
...
It seems to me that there are a number of interrelated factors
which must be considered in answering the question.
First and foremost are questions like:
1. How friendly or hostile is the environment?
2. How rapidly is the environment changing?
As Lorentz pointed out:
3. What is the reproductive rate do we allow?
As Ron Okimoto pointed out, with humans, there is the additional
factor of:
4. How much knowledge and technology is available to them?
Still others are:
5. Is the environment open or closed?
6. What sort of culture do the people have?
7. Which selection of genes is found in the population?
8. What social and political culture do the people have?
9. Is there a dangerous homocidal maniac among them?
In the worst case, for example, all of the people are infected with
a severe and rapidly mutating pathogen, or there is one in their
environment. The weather is hostile and changes rapidly. The
surrounding ecology is changing rapidly. New invasive species
are coming in all the time. The people in the group are divided
into blocks that are at war with each other. Homocidal maniacs
have taken control of each block. Even a large population might
die pretty quickly.
In the best case perhaps, the people are on a totally self-supporting
space station with zero occurrence of pathogens or predators
attacking them, their food supply, or any of their life support systems.
The station itself is completely self-repairing, and there are no
collisions with asteroids or space debris. The people are well
educated and psychologically stable. A quite small population
might live for many, many generations.
If we have nailed down answers to all of the questions about
interrelated factors, we could come up with some hypotheses
about minimum population size under those specific conditions.
I don't know how we could test with humans, but we probably
could test very well with simpler, rapidly growing organisms like
yeast or bacteria or, better for higher organisms, fruit flies or
Arabidopsis.
Alan
.
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