Am I missing something or what? If a man and a woman could create X amount of offspring, how would the offspring make more offspring? Wouldn't they all be siblings and create "freaks of nature" babies? Sorry if there's some obvious answer that I'm overlooking, but this is really bugging me now.

Can't be done. You would create such a weak species, it would be extinct in a couple of generations.

Nah they just need to make some test tube babies problem solved. IN all truth I think generations of inbreeding won't end well.

Yes, they would. Mankind is pretty much doomed if it's ever down to just two people. Luckily for us, there has never been such a case with any species in which only a lone two have proceeded to repopulate by any degree.

Nope.

I knew it! Thanks, guys. I guess my friend owes me five dollars now.

Yeah, the main thing that sixual reproduction has over asixual reproduction is biodiversity. If you have only two humans left, biodiversity is pretty much all gone. It would make the species extremely susceptible to diseases and viruses. Not to mention some of the nasty effects of inbreeding.

Eventually, yes. There needs to be more than two people. You're 100% related by blood to your siblings, but only 50% to your parents. So maybe, theoretically, if the children mated with the parents, as disgusting as it may be, the race would have a better chance at surviving. But a race breeding with it's own siblings would never survive. Either way, "survive" certainly wouldn't mean "prosper," they'd all have genetic problems.

I wish my friends would make bets like that with me

I think you should pay us the $5 though we answered your question or at least give me $5 .

Is it really 100%? Only some genes get passed down to certain offspring, so you might have genotypes from your siblings. Just a guess though.

Yay Punnet Squares! :celebration:

I disagree. I think it could happen. It just wouldn't be so pleasant. I think if you can past the initial two-three generations without much hassle, you should be able to get back on track and develop healthily again after that. Who knows, maybe that resultant inbred-mutation would be helpful. I'd say it's down to chance.

I don't know, that's just what I learned way back in high school health, or Anatomy, or something, so I could be wrong. :shrug:

Hey, man, I said something just like that last night; you guys were just the confirmation we needed.

did you ever see the ending to Dr strangelove or how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9ihKq34Ozc&feature=related this clip sums it up...and any situation that might lead to such a predicament

Hey, I can think of so many ways this thread can go wrong.

Google Answers suggests the minimum viable human population for space colonisation to be 150-180, so that's probably the "best guess".

Sure they could. You'd end up with a population that had a big "founder effect".

We don't know of cases where an entire human population was due to a single pair of founders. We do know of cases where the number of founders (either migrants or disaster survivors) was no more than 17, and of cases where the number of fathers (due to religious polygamy) was no more than 2.

In that situation, deleterious dominant genes get eliminated immediately, and deleterious recessives get established at low frequencies. But you don't get a population of freaks or an unsurvivably large number of non-viable pregnancies.