Pedigree Collapse (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Pedigree collapse is a term created by Robert C. Gunderson to describe how reproduction between two individuals who knowingly or unknowingly share an ancestor causes the family tree of their offspring to be smaller than it could otherwise be.Without pedigree collapse, a person's ancestor tree is a binary tree, formed by the person, the parents, grandparents, and so on. However, the number of individuals in such a tree grows exponentially and will eventually become impossibly high. For example, a single individual alive today would, over 30 generations going back to the High Middle Ages, have 230 or roughly a billion ancestors, more than the total world population at the time.