How many people would you need in a society to stop them from becoming inbred?
Derek asked:
In the X-Men comics at the moment they’ve had some mass extinction event that left only 200(approx) mutants left. Its been said that with only 200 of their species left they no longer have the genetic diversity to breed without becoming inbred.
How many people would they need to prevent this? I’ve noticed that other endangered species in the animal kingdom have similar numbers does that mean they don’t have the genetic diversity to continue as a species either or do humans need higher numbers than animals.
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In the X-Men comics at the moment they’ve had some mass extinction event that left only 200(approx) mutants left. Its been said that with only 200 of their species left they no longer have the genetic diversity to breed without becoming inbred.
How many people would they need to prevent this? I’ve noticed that other endangered species in the animal kingdom have similar numbers does that mean they don’t have the genetic diversity to continue as a species either or do humans need higher numbers than animals.
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It depends where you draw the line on what is inbred and what is not.
For good genetic diversity of a population 10 000+ is a fair enough size.
I’ve heard the number, and it is either 5,000 or 50,000. I beleive the 50,000 number was it but am not sure.
Inbred is a problem only if you have genetic weaknesses in the subject population. A small population that was strict about not allowing the weak to breed would still be able to survive as the weak genes would not be allowed to express themselves across teh generations.
Over time if the population grew enough then natural genetic mutations would add some diversity to the population, but that would take a great deal of time (tens of 1,000’s of years)
It does not matter how many you start with any limited population will become interbred over an extended time period. Interbreeding is only a bad thing if you do not cull the defectives.