So, there they are, Aiden and Ellie, the only survivors to have not succumbed to the apocalypse.
Still in their late teens, the two are in their prime, at least when it comes to
making babies. The good news is they have the hots for each other, but can they repopulate the Earth?
You all know that there’s a version of human history that involves two folks getting it on
and kicking off mankind. Those two star-struck lovers were Adam and Eve,
a couple that made the Garden of Eden their home. We’re not exactly sure what kind of food they
had to sustain their lives in the garden, but probably a bit more than the forbidden fruit.
As for Aiden and Ellie, there is plenty of food on their lonely planet.
The old blue ball didn’t get whacked by an asteroid or anything similarly cataclysmic.
It was forward-thinking artificial intelligence that wiped everyone out,
but then it destroyed itself just before it could finish off the last two humans.
The animals were still around. The AI was programmed to ensure the sustainability of
the Earth at any cost, and then it figured out that humans were going to destroy the planet,
so the only rational thing to do was to destroy all humans. Yeah, whoever developed
that program sure upset a lot of folks. For the first couple of months,
Aiden and Ellie didn’t really think much about starting mankind again. They spent
much of their time hanging out in rich people’s houses and driving fast cars. Ellie almost drove
into a tree one day, and after that, the couple decided not to take too many risks.
There was some serious business to take care of. Thankfully, they lived in Los Angeles, California,
which having a mild climate meant the couple didn’t have anything to fear from a brutal
winter and the fact there was no electricity. Let’s just say that while the apocalypse was a
bit of a downer, these two got very lucky in terms of their chances of survival.
They also had the added bonus of not being related. That’s a good thing
because studies have shown that when children are born from folks who are related there’s a
higher rate of infant mortality. Even if the kids survive, there’s a much higher chance that those
kids will be born with some kind of defect. Nonetheless, Ellie and Aiden’s offspring might
be born healthy, but what about the offspring’s offspring? Now we run into difficulties.
In a study undertaken in Czechoslovakia between the years 1933 and 1970,
scientists looked at the children of parents who were first-degree relatives. First-degree
is someone in your direct family. Procreating with these people isn’t generally a cool thing to do.
Even if first cousins get it on, the offspring has double the chance of having a birth defect.
In that study, the kids who were born to first-degree parents didn’t have
great outcomes. 40 percent of them had very severe disabilities. 14 percent
of them died because of their disabilities. We have a very good real-life example of this,
featuring a man you might think was trying to increase the population of his country.
That man was King Chulalongkorn of Thailand, who ruled from 1868 to 1910.
This guy did a lot of good things in terms of modernizing his country,
and he was also a formidable baby-maker, just as his father had been.
That father was King Mongkut, who had 82 children in total.
One of them was Chulalongkorn. Following in his daddy’s footsteps,
Chulalongkorn had a lot of wives, consorts, and concubines, adding up to 116 women in
total. To keep the bloodline pure, several of his partners with whom he had children were
actually his half-sisters. Back in those days, it still wasn’t clear how bad inbreeding was.
But the proof soon became evident in the pudding, so to speak.
He had a kid with a half-sister named Daksinajar Naradhirajbutri. It died just hours after it was
born. He had eight kids with half-sister Savang Vadhana. One of them lived for just three days and
most of them didn’t make it to adulthood. Vadhana herself lived until the ripe old age of 93.
She was the product of inbreeding. In fact, if you research what happened
to his 77 children, you see that many, and we are talking many, didn’t live very long at all.
A lot of them died when they were barely out of their fancy infant clothes.
Many others died in their twenties and thirties.
European royalty was also into keeping things in the family to ensure the bloodline was pure and
also to make certain money and property stayed with the family after someone passed away.
European inbreeding in royal families was very evident in the Spanish Habsburg dynasty. Offspring
were often weak and sickly, and there was also the now-famous deformity called the Hapsburg jaw.
The internet might have been down in Aiden and Ellie’s brave new world, but they did have access
to books and libraries, and being the prudent folks they were, they read up on inbreeding.
After going through a few books on the matter, they were rightfully afraid their kids’ kids
would bite the dust just as soon as they let out that first primal scream or perhaps spend their
short lives hobbling around while carrying a jaw that would put Desperate Dan to shame.
The couple also read about the Colt family in Australia and the marriage between June and Jim.
In short, June was the child of a brother and sister. She married Jim Colt. They were in New
Zealand at the time. They had seven kids of their own and moved to Australia. More kids
were born once those kids were old enough to have children, but the Colts didn’t stray much
farther than their own home, if you get what we mean. The children were born through incest.
A lot of the kids had defects, and some seemed a little mentally deranged and did things like
hurt animals. Many were very sickly and prone to disease. Incest wasn’t working out very well for
the family. When an investigator found them, he said it was “like nothing I've ever seen.”
This story sent shivers down Aiden and Ellie’s spines, with both of them just sitting for a
while in the library thinking about a team of kids running around with fungal feet
trying to set cows on fire. But did it have to be that
way? That’s the big question today. Some, not many, of King Chulalongkorn’s
children that he had with his sisters went on to have fairly normal lives, although admittedly it’s
hard to find kids who lived past the age of 40. Aiden and Ellie were now certain that a small
gene pool was going to lead to a future offspring of physically and mentally
ill kids once their own children started procreating. But what choice did they have?
They had one kid, a boy, and named him Carl. Then they had another kid and they named him
Asher. Damn, they thought, two boys. Then Carl accidentally killed Asher when they were fighting
over toys, after which Ellie and Aiden had a third child and named him Sebastian. Another boy!
With not much to do, these two last adult humans just kept pumping out kid after kid,
as many in fact as was possible given Ellie’s natural aging process. The kids for the most
part grew up fine, but the kids’ kids were a different matter altogether.
Let’s us explain something now, before we get to the strange case of the extended family.
You’ve heard of that thing called DNA. Well, it has packaged into it 23 pairs of chromosomes.
Within every chromosome, there are hundreds of thousands of genes. It’s these things
that will determine human characteristics, such as hair color, but some of them are
also bad to the bone, sometimes literally. Every gene has a couple of copies and they
are called alleles. When two people have a child, they pass on one pair to the child.
There are dominant and recessive genes, too. If one pair of genes is dominant,
you will have the trait of that gene when it’s passed on to you.
With recessive genes, it is different, because you need both pairs of genes to gain the trait.
For example, the gene for brown eyes is dominant, so if you get that you will have brown eyes.
But for blues eyes, it is different, because that gene is recessive. You’d need both recessive genes
to get blue eyes. In this case, both your parents passed on blue-eyed pairs of genes,
but if one of your parents had the brown-eyed gene, you’d get brown eyes.
Importantly, though, as you know, not all children get the same DNA from their parents
unless they are twins. You get 50 percent of your DNA from both parents, making 100 percent.
Now, imagine that DNA, say, from your mom was half a pack of cards. When the next child is born,
the pack is shuffled, so that the next child doesn’t get the same DNA with all the same genes.
But, if there were lots of children and you kept shuffling the pack, at some point
some sets of genes will look similar to another child’s. This is important to know
as we go along with the Ellie and Aiden story. The good news is that many defective traits
are carried in recessive genes. This is great, because they aren’t very common,
and to get that harmful trait, you’ll have to get a pair of them. This is exactly why
it is good to play the field with strangers. Ok, that’s a joke, but if your parents are related
there is a more chance they carry some defective gene, and in that case, the child might get a pair
and one thing leads to another and a child is born with a chin that looks like an old boot.
If there are generations all from the same gene pool, at some point even with all the shuffling,
some bad genes might match up. The Hapsburg, Charles II of Spain,
was the man famous for his chin. It took generations of inbreeding to make him like that.
In fact, he was born with scores of defects and disabilities which made his life hell.
After many years of suffering, he died aged 38. Just to give you an idea of what can go wrong,
here’s what his autopsy report said: “Heart was the size of a peppercorn;
his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous; he had a single testicle,
black as coal, and his head was full of water.” When Ellie read that she fainted on the spot just
thinking about future generations of her family. The first thing that came to mind was a grandkid
of hers looking like a character from a movie she’d watched as a kid called “The Toxic Avenger.”
But then one day she was reading another book, and something improved her grim mood. She read
the lines, “The evidence for the short-term effects of low genetic diversity is very strong,
but all these things are probabilistic. There are stories of incredible journeys back from
the brink - anything is possible.” You can get very lucky playing cards.
Ellie tried to translate that in laymen’s terms and came to the conclusion that if she and Aiden
knocked out enough kids and those kids knocked out enough kids then despite the fact there
will be lots of challenges (cow burning even) some of the kids could possibly flourish and
the future of mankind could be in the bag. Ellie’s hair eventually turned a shade of
gray and at that time her beloved husband was a formidable farmer. Things didn’t seem too bad,
but some of her grandkids had lives that were, as one of her favorite
writers would have put it, “nasty and short”. She and Aiden had 10 sons, 18 daughters, in total.
They in turn had kids with each other, because that’s just how things had to be.
Evolution actually wants us to be attracted to people who are genetically different from us,
but the future of mankind demanded they make do with each other.
Ellie was still worried, having read that there is more chance of defects the more inbreeding takes
place, such as what happened to the Hapsburgs. If only Ellie knew what genes all her grandkids had,
she could safely match them so children weren’t born unhealthy, but that wasn’t possible.
She had a reason for some optimism though when she read about the people of the
small island called Pingelap, who lived far from the busy world in the western Pacific.
These people were almost wiped out in the 18th century when a typhoon struck the island,
but 20 of them survived. They flourished after, even though a recessive gene
ensured that many years later a tenth of the island was afflicted with color-blindness.
The thing was, this disorder, called complete achromatopsia, was thought to have come
from one man. But it didn’t show up in the population until the fourth generation. But still,
not everyone got it. This made Ellie happy. She sat there with the book in her hand and
with one of her granddaughters crying from a crib nearby, she repeated those words in her mind,
“Anything is possible, anything is possible.” We are going to bounce back, she said under her
breath in a determined voice, even though out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed
one of her less successful by-products giggling while throwing an aerosol can into a small fire.
There was a long way to go yet, and what’s called the “Founder effect” was in full
swing – meaning a profound lack of genetic diversity as generations interbreed. Still,
while Ellie’s family admittedly all looked very similar, she held out hope that in
generations to come there would be natural mutations and some diversity would occur.
Since Aiden in those days seemed only interested in tending to his vegetables
and cattle – he’d become so distant – Ellie read more and more. In some ways,
they were a perfect couple, with she being the academic one and he being so good with his hands.
One day Ellie told Aiden that there were instances in history in which animals likely created entire
populations after starting as pairs. They were eating when she looked at him and shouted “rats!”.
“What?” replied Aiden, feeling confused. She told him a single pair of rats started a population
on some island and the rats thrived. He then gave her a familiar look and said,
“Don’t tell me you read that on one of those printouts from that old website, Quora.”
Ellie went quiet and returned to her room, where she read the printout again.
It said, “Starlings in North America originated from just 60 individuals;
there are a couple hundred million of them now, most of which are nearly genetically identical.”
That seemed like good news, but she understood that a “small population” was different
from the last two. She couldn’t find any examples in her books when an animal species had gone down
to the last pair and then started up again. Ellie died first. She was 93. Aiden, 92,
held her hand as she drifted into the great unknown. At her side were all her kids,
grandkids, and great-grandkids. One of them, known as “Chinny” to the rest, made her moan
in distress just before passing away. The poor kid had just put some broken glass in his mouth.
But she remembered some words written by a scientist back in 2015. “If the whole world were
founded by two people, you would have to get lucky in the genetic lottery many times.” Ellie and
Aiden might have been lucky, but as Ellie took her dying breath she just couldn’t know. Surrounded
by all those faces, things didn’t look too bad. Nonetheless, she knew things could take a turn
for the worst, and she also knew that a long time ago some researchers had said
you’d probably need 98 unrelated humans to repopulate a planet, but there she was,
looking at people who had come from her and Aiden. So, could it happen, really, the repopulation of
the planet from these two? The answer is yes, it could, maybe, but as those scientists said,
there would have to be a lot of luck. Perhaps if it did happen, thousands of years
later no one would believe the story of Ellie and Aiden, the avid reader and the cabbage patch kid.
The reality is, scientists aren’t sure how we evolved at the beginning,
but they certainly don’t think it all kicked off with two randy people in the Garden of Eden.
They know there were different types of humans (the homo genus) hanging about in Africa around
a couple of million years ago, such as Homo habilis (handyman), Homo erectus (upright man),
and then it took quite a while for the presence of Homo sapiens, uptight man.
Just kidding. It can be translated as wise man. Before homo sapiens, the oldest form of humans
mated with newer kinds of humans, such as homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals).
Neanderthals and modern humans also mated. So, in short, it wasn’t as if there was only
a very small gene pool when things started. With that in mind, we can’t look at the case
of Ellie and Aiden and compare it with something from the past. We can only hypothesize that if two
people were left alone on the planet they might be able to fill it up again. It’s a long shot,
but Ellie and Aiden at least tried. After that, you really should watch
“Why It Would Suck To Live Through The End Of The Universe.” Or, have a look at...