Actually not all flying insects have a specific number of stages. There are species, where the number of larval instars vary. Anyway, none moults after metamorphosis to the flying form.

That would be maybe more like the expected height given phenotype or genotype of parents, or posterior probability of height in certain range? The oldest quantitative prediction is that progeny is the average of parents. Clearly hides a lot of variation under that simple mean. Maybe check things like estimated breeding value. Might help. Good luck.

Probability of a qualitative (categorical) trait, no? Or what was the probability you asked, did I miss something? Now if you think of quantitative genetic trait... such as height... one could have probability of being above a given height or such. Disease traits are sometimes polygenic in one way (risk) while the trait can be categorical (sick or not).

100% h2 means all trait variation is of genetic origin. Among other things, it does not consider the trait mean value in any way. Anyway, h2 is more quantitative genetics issue. The probability sounds bit more like qualitative genetics question. Sometimes the difference is not very strict.

There is the claim that any system can be (approximately) reverse engineered if one has access to the results of the system. Are those too hidden from the public?

What is "best" is subjective. At least I was reading last week that any moderate fitness related interest brings quite unhealthy content very quickly. But it has to be better than Amazon's system, anyway.

Not sure about importance of that compared to larger parasites. One famous ethical problems in science was that people were given infection of... I think it was pig roundworm in stomach. It cannot procreate in human. But the people lost their allergies. So now the ethical question was, do people participating experiment get to keep the worm that is beneficial to them. Anyway, one hypothesis is that allergies are due to lack of parasites when we have a system to fight against them.

Yes and no. It is bit complicated. Some disorders are combinations of variants of different genes, so there it is not the cause. Some are caused by dominant gene variants, so there as well, relatedness does not play a role. But then there are the recessive disorders, where you must inherit similar bad variant from mother and father, so there relatedness does matter.

Close relatedness of parents increases the proportion of genes, where the child has two identical variants. If some proportion of the genes are coding recessive disorders, one is more likely have an disorder. It is the mutation or the genotype that causes the disorder. Relatedness has impact on the genotype. So relatedness can have an indirect impact, but that depends on the existence of those mutations or gene variants.

Most disorders are of the recessive type or something that was beneficial in a different environment.

We are all "somehow related".

My question too. If a simple request is enough to get the work done, the work was too easy. The standard outputs are quite boring and low quality, but with good additional criteria and limits and requests, the output begins to become interesting. But at that point it is more like cocreation. In my testing, I found that I can save about 30% of the time compared to writing it myself, not more. Since the AI tends to hallucinate when subject is challenging, you need to direct the AI carefully.The main benefit coming from the use of AI is that one needs to think and describe the requested text outline and focus and aim very well. After that is done, writing is very easy anyway. AI just writes better English than some of us.

By the way, famines used to be very common just 200 years ago, or even less. There were several per generation, also but not only in Finland. Basically that is why agricultural subsidy systems were created. Either there was way too little food or there was way too much food. Trade was not able to balance things enough.

These are side effects of HOW Finns lost variation, and what variation was there in the beginning. This is not result of low variability itself, but impact of what variability was left. Basically inbreeding depression. A very slow population decline could result in quite different end result, more akin to purging less advantageous gene variant combinations out of the population.

Effect of low variability is that the population is slow in adapting genetically (by selection on existing variation). Need to wait for suitable mutations.

Generally, many inherited diseases are adaptations to other environments. I guess the last one I saw, was suggestion that many autoimmune disorders are related to survivability over plague.

[Added: By the way, Finns lack many genetic diseases that are common elsewhere]

This is from Seppälä and colleagues 97 "Consumption of macrolide antibiotics decreased from 2.40 defined daily doses per 1000 inhabitants per day in 1991 to 1.38 in 1992 (P = 0.007) and remained near the lower level during the study period. The change in consumption was followed by a steady decrease in the frequency of erythromycin resistance among group A streptococcal isolates from throat swabs and pus samples, from 16.5 percent in 1992 to 8.6 percent in 1996 (odds ratio for 1996 as compared with 1992, 0.5; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.4 to 0.5)."

I agree. Last time I read more about dog domestication, I think domestication more than 16 000 years ago was not having strong evidence, so people had different opinions or interpretations. 16000 years is a long time too. Anyway, maybe that is a minimum estimate. Cannot say if anything new has been found recently. The genomic and archaeological methods develop quickly, but it is still bit challenging to apply those methods to a large number of samples. I have a feeling this type of research is bit less popular or funded at the moment. Could be a personal bias as well.

A quick check: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-08132-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12864-021-07761-5 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42991-020-00059-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10344-019-1313-3 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eva.13257 https://hrcak.srce.hr/clanak/298395 https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/37/9/2616/5834723

Did not read them all.

I hate to be the guy... "genetic drift" should be replaced with "gene flow" above. Apologies, but it is really annoying to read and cannot help myself. 😬 Genetic drift is a different thing, sort of the opposite, or, to be more precise, gene flow often reduces genetic drift within populations.

The timing of dog domestication is bit unsure, you prefer a very distant estimate. I would prefer to start 30k as the oldest estimate, and even that might be stretching a bit. I believe Wayne et all have preferred that number. I could be wrong, but I would remember the 100k was shown to be overinterpretation of the data they had.

Not sure if you have ever consumed Larsson's comics. In one wolves talk about domesticated humans. Not completely wrong. It's a matter of perspective. The first domestications were quite complex and slow processes. All those were sort of "pact" or "flock" or "hive" species, so with a strong social structure and were preadapted to domestication. That predomestication is one reason why timing domestications is so complicated, especially for dog.

People mix taming and domestication all the time. They are different things. You can domesticate without taming (some fish as an easy example). For sure you can tame without domesticating (brown bear). Dog is a domesticated type of wolf. Last time I looked into it, they said the wild ancestor is none of the present day wolf types. Gone extinct.

Hybridization is not good or bad,. But it is very risky. Bit like taming wild animals. Anything can happen. It can destroy the genetic basis of the population, but sometimes might help too. Challenging to optimize.

The question by OP is challenging. I did not find global estimates of gene flow just now, though I remember seeing some in different units than proportion (as effective gene flow estimated from modern day data). That sample set was bit lacking, though. Causes biases. Anyway, here is a nice read around the hybridization question, and how the experts see it. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2019.00175/full

Sorry for the rant. Cheers.

Fish do have quite a lot of worms and other parasites, fungal and viral problems, in fact. Some studies suggest marine animals might be more susceptible to diseases due to environmental chances and population densities. Some studies suggest marine animals meet more microbes, while dryness, UV and some other factors reduce half life of terrestrial microbes. However, it is a difficult comparison. Moreover, how do you want to define "disease"? The definition Google gives is "a disorder of structure or function in a human, animal, or plant, especially one that has a known cause and a distinctive group of symptoms, signs, or anatomical changes." I assume pollutants, temperature and so on cause more diseases in the marine environment, at least I hear more of them.

Not the smart guy you ask, but been doing astrophotography. The number of stars one can see even with just a little bit more exposure time is amazing. And that is just about the visible light... well mostly. I would not call deep space dark.

You are correct. Might just add that for "summer adapted" physiological state, without the antifreezes, it goes other way round sometimes. Getting some warmth now and then helps. In case you know and can share some of that physiology, would be happy to hear more.

Suggests it could be https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-294X.1999.00695.x

Inbreeding quicker than in recent past increases the RISK of deleterious genetic syndromes. Moreover, adaptive potential might be lower.

Species can adapt to inbreeding to some extent. More outbred the species is, more damaging the inbreeding is.

1000 is not needed. Well sampled 50 is very good already, if the idea is to know about past and influential things. And even no genome is needed. Maybe couple of thousands of SNPs is enough.

So you are sure noone studied it yet? Check the case for Swedish wolves if you want to know of a similar thing.

Genome is one full set of chromosomes, so haploid is the correct number. This was the first time I saw anyone suggesting the diploid amount of DNA as genome size. Wonder how one would handle the mitochondrial genome using that approach? The number of them varies greatly, though I guess their share is about 1% only.

I would modify that a bit... Anything collecting and using information is life. Of course the next question is, how about in silico...