Over a sufficient number of generations, inbred populations can regain "normal" genetic diversity.

Isle Royale, he said, would provide "an acid test for the notion that inbred populations are not viable."

Scientists believe they are dealing with a very inbred population, in which even a large number of animals could share identical or near identical haplotypes.

The unspoken fear in tiny rural towns with inbred populations is that one of their own might someday snap and start mowing down the neighbors.

The mutation sometimes occurs in the random-breeding population, particularly in inbred populations where recessive genes may be exhibited.

The value for F is found by solving the equation for F using heterozygotes in the above inbred population.

Although there are several examples of inbred populations of wild animals, the negative consequences of this inbreeding are poorly documented.

However, because the increased proportion of deleterious homozygotes exposes the allele to natural selection, in the long run its frequency decreases more rapidly in inbred population.

But the Cereans have been away from Earth a long time, and they've developed some differences from the basic humanoid stock-a process called 'genetic drift' that's common in small, inbred populations.

Moreover, if the mutant gene confers benefits, such as better camouflage, then affected individuals may out-compete those without the mutation; this would happen faster in a small inbred population close to panmixia.

"We need to realize that all of our biology, all of our understanding, comes from studying inbred populations" like mice that are bred to be genetically identical, Dr. Hartwell said.

Roughly speaking, the coefficient of relationship approaches a value of 1 for individuals from a completely inbred population, and approaches a value of 0 for individuals with arbitrarily remote common ancestors.

Today's California Condor is the sole surviving member of Gymnogyps and has no accepted subspecies; although its range greatly contracted during the Holocene, the species always had a small and inbred population.

To the Editor: Contrary to your April 22 news article on the frequency of inherited disorders among people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, Ashkenazi Jews as a whole are not an inbred population.

But overdominance implies that yields on an inbred strain should decrease as inbred strains are selected for the performance of their hybrid crosses, as the proportion of harmful recessives in the inbred population rises.