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Comment by defen | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

> 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.

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