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But the question is how the population size relates to health, which you haven't answered here. You have numbers for the number of deleterious mutations, but t

But the question is how the population size relates to health, which you haven't answered here. You have numbers for the number of deleterious mutations, but that doesn't directly give a quantitative relationship between population size and health.

defen 11y ago
It's because your question isn't really properly formed. What do you mean by "health"? The chance of a person having a really shitty genetic disorder? The fitness cost of inbreeding as a function of coefficient of relationship? The probability that a bottlenecked population will go to zero due to harmful mutations, as a function of the bottleneck size?
- formulaT 11y ago
  I would be interested in seeing any of these quantified. And I'm not asking for people to educate me, but rather for people to take a more careful look at which claims can be directly justified by the science, vs which claims are assertions made based on extrapolating from very different data. The claim was that the population size of Tristan da Cunha is problematic. I still haven't seen any direct evidence presented of this fact.
  - Udo 11y ago
    > The claim was that the population size of Tristan da Cunha is problematic. I still haven't seen any direct evidence presented of this fact. You linked to an article about the higher incidence of asthma on that island yourself (above), and the reason why the number of individuals is so high directly traces to the islanders' gene pool. However, I wouldn't say the population size is unsustainable. They are more likely to be decimated by a random disease or, over generations, by a shared mutation. But the population is not nonviable. The issue is more that, to the modern humanitarian mind, they will have to deal with more ill effects due to the genetic monoculture.
IndianAstronaut 11y ago
These might help. Biological fitness is definitely quantifiable and is a major component of population genetics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_purging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_purging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding_depression http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding_depression

defen 11y ago

It's because your question isn't really properly formed. What do you mean by "health"? The chance of a person having a really shitty genetic disorder? The fitness cost of inbreeding as a function of coefficient of relationship? The probability that a bottlenecked population will go to zero due to harmful mutations, as a function of the bottleneck size?

formulaT 11y ago
I would be interested in seeing any of these quantified. And I'm not asking for people to educate me, but rather for people to take a more careful look at which claims can be directly justified by the science, vs which claims are assertions made based on extrapolating from very different data. The claim was that the population size of Tristan da Cunha is problematic. I still haven't seen any direct evidence presented of this fact.
- Udo 11y ago
  > The claim was that the population size of Tristan da Cunha is problematic. I still haven't seen any direct evidence presented of this fact. You linked to an article about the higher incidence of asthma on that island yourself (above), and the reason why the number of individuals is so high directly traces to the islanders' gene pool. However, I wouldn't say the population size is unsustainable. They are more likely to be decimated by a random disease or, over generations, by a shared mutation. But the population is not nonviable. The issue is more that, to the modern humanitarian mind, they will have to deal with more ill effects due to the genetic monoculture.

IndianAstronaut 11y ago

These might help. Biological fitness is definitely quantifiable and is a major component of population genetics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_purging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_purging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding_depression http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding_depression