Found this somewhat interesting link that supports some of what I was saying, though mostly tangentially.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect

Basically a small subset of a population that goes and isolates itself can end up being extraordinarily different than the parent population after a period of time.

Interesting to note:
1) Rare genes tend to two extremes, either they die out quickly or they become much more prevalent.
       If you consider that perception of the onta is kind of a genetic trait (after all, how could the Inchoroi developed this if it where not tied to genetics?), then you can say that most of the Dunyain could have been schoolmen. We know that there are only a few Few, and that both the original Dunyain that we know of were of the Few. Clearly the trait didn't die out, so maybe this ability was bred into all of them.

2) Polydactyly (extra toes, etc) was specifically mentioned in the wiki page as being more common in Amish groups because they have "grown from a very few founders, have not recruited newcomers, and tend to marry within the community". Reminded me of Esmi.

3)Isolated populations tend to speciate if separated for long periods of time. I think its likely that the Dunyain have trouble breeding with normal humans because they are nearly a different species (or the whole nonman thing, but thats a story for a different time).

Well maybe it was the mothership. Could be that it was a huge traveling station, but by the time the Inchoroi got to Earwa orbit, most of them had died. The remaining Inchoroi went down to the planet in their last ship, and the crash landed, killing 90% of what was left. That could explain why there is no mention of the mothership, its just an empty hunk of metal that can't be reached...

Olympos by Dan Simmons.  Good shit.

Currently reading Hyperion, so for its pretty great.

How many were the original Dunyain refugees?
tl:dr version: I figure as low as 16, but safely 32 families, which is just 8-16 male/female pairs.

The long version:

I’ve ask this question several times and gotten no answer. I’ve also tried to ask a broader question: What is the minimum number of people it would take to get an increasingly diverse population? Put another way, how can you keep from inbreeding with a finite supply of families?

The issue is that in the beginning, the original Dunyain that show up at Ishual is simply described as a “group” (page 3, English small edition). It always seemed to me that any group, isolated for 2000 years, would need to be fairly large in order to sustain viable offspring for dozens of generations. A “group” that large would probably not have made it through the wild, sranc infested North. Also, the terrified boy (our POV) might have used a much grander word if he saw hundreds of people standing outside his walls. Considering that the Dunyain were not overly popular to begin with, I just had trouble rectifying the situation.

I finally sat down and thought about it for a while and here is what I came up with.
BTW for the rest of this, assume the Dunyain don’t care much for love, or have any taboos about age and sex that would prevent them from having children.

I appologize for my inadequacy, but I couldnt figure out how to add the photos so I've just attached them.

Typically, one tends to think of family trees like this:  see attachment "Ishual Family A" at bottom of post.


The idea is that each color is a different family bloodline. The circles are male, the squares are female. Every family could have multiple children (but shown as just one for simplicity), but it doesn’t really matter. Each time the children retain about half of each parents genetic code, so everything is just cut in half with each generation. At the bottom you see that after a few generations, all the children are all the same: they each are 1/8 parts of each bloodline.

The problem with this is that in just a few generations, all the children are related, and you have to start inbreeding them. With a setup like that, you need to double the original number of starting “families”, or in this case colors, every time you want to add another generation. After 10 generations you would need an original host of 512 separate bloodlines, or 1000+ parents. Way to many to be wondering around the woods running from the No-God. Even if they did, and they managed to make each generation a full 30 years apart, you’d only get 300 years before everyone was related. Maybe they would all be 1/512 parts related, I have no clue how that would affect things. I’m sure given 1700 years of breeding together fully related children you would eventually end up with a bunch of terrible genetic disorders.

I then decided to look at it a different way. My new goal was to see how many generations I could go without breeding together people that where related at all. If you could keep introducing a new line into the combined lines, you could get wide variance with a small population.

This is what happens:  see attachment "Ishual Family Spiral"



Here you can see the same kind of thing as described above, but represented differently. As you can see, the child still has 1/2 of each parent, but since one of the parents is a totally unique line, the new genes are about 1/2, and all the other lines half as well. The fractions show the total amount of genetic space that each bloodline exists within the person.
I thought this was interesting because after about 6 generations the original parent bloodline, 1+F, is down to only 1/32. If you consider that humans have 23 chromosome pairs, I thought that this might be enough to consider it a negligible amount of genetic data (that’s probably a crappy assumption but its all I got ok?).

In this scheme, each new bloodline (1-10)  must have been the offspring of the original Dunyain refugees. This causes another problem, because if all those children were born at the same time, even with only 15 years between generations, they would be way to old to breed after about 60 years, or 4 generations of breeding. That only gets you to generation 5, which has an uncomfortable amount of the parent generation’s genes still.

Then I realized that that assumes all the kids were born at the same time and were about the same age. The parents could all have multiple sets of children. The Dunyain women could probably still bare children safely from around 15 years old until they are 40, while the men could keep breeding until they died (I think the oldest human to have a sire a child is somewhere around 95 years old). This means that while there must be about 15 years between each new generation, child could vary in age by 25 years or more.

With all that I came up with this family tree: see attachment "Ishual Family B"



I got to 7 generations with these 8 families before any child was realted to all of the others. Keep in mind that his is only a sample, each could be done in a different order with different parents each time. This makes it possible to have every possible permutation of that final circle: every combinations of colors would be possible to get.
One thing to note is that at generation 6 I stopped breeding the “pure” lines. This is because, at 12-15 years between each generation, those original children would be unlikely to still be alive, but their offspring could still be viable breeding partners.
Once here, it got too complicated for me to draw and harder to visualize. As you can see, the original dark-red/light-red family occupies only 1/64 parts of the whole. I’d say that’s a negligible amount, and you could then breed in a partner who is primarily those two colors (essentially the generation 7’s great great great uncle/aunt). I think that’s viable, since if you say that there are 15 years between generations, it takes 75 years to get to 7, and there are at least 20 years within each generation. This makes a 3xgreat uncle about 60 (still viable partner if it’s a male… maybe).
This setup takes 8 bloodlines, or 16 parents.

If you don’t like that, or still think that 1/64 is too similar to breed with someone who is 50/50 that genetic material, you can double the whole thing with another 8 bloodlines. This doubles your total parents to 32, and gets you 1 additional generation if you combine the two multi color bloodlines, and it makes the children 1/128 parts of the original 4 parent’s bloodlines.

I think this at least shows that you can get some extreme variation with just a small starting pool of genetic data of sufficiently different parents. None of this accounts for dominant/recessive traits, or cross-linking of chromosomes, or mutation, which would increase diversity and (probably) decrease the amount of time you would need to start breeding with an ancestor. Note that any debilitating genetic disorder would have been removed via the Dunyain’s Thousand Thousand halls (their version of accelerated natural selections and/or eugenics). Even diseases that are dominant should be able to be weeded out that way if the affected children die in the Halls before they breed. Again, I think that would further decrease the real number of generations required.

Anyway, that was long winded and I probably forgot some things that I assumed, or left out a certain bit of reasoning that makes none of it make sense. Oh well. What do you think? Possible? Stupid? Huge waste of time? Yeah probably, but it was fun.

Nice I'll add them to the list. Currently reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons and I'm rather pleased.

So there are supposed to be 2 or 3 books left in TSA series after TUC, which is awesome. But I've discovered a problem. At this rate, Bakker is going to take 15-20 years to finish up the series. I'll be 40+ by that time, which means baker will be well into his 60's.

The current average lifespan is around 75 for males (i think). 60-something is cutting it a bit closer than I'd like. Bakker, if you die before you finish this series, I'm going to freak out. Depression, for starters, is probably the first of many side affects.

I propose that if he does die before he finishes it up, the 4 of us that are still waiting should collaborate to write an ending to the series. However poorly, it would need to be done for the sake of our own sanity.

That is all.

Does anyone happen to know when it is first mentioned the Kellhus either apprehends or starts using TTT?

The "hinges of destiny" quote from tDtCB has been bothering me recently and for some reason I see the timing of Kellhus' revelations about TTT being the missing piece in one of my never to be written, hot sauce induced, crackpot theories.

What the hell, you're holding out on us? Come now, lets have it. I'll not stand for this hording of crackpotery.

Sorry, but I'm at work without my books, and at my house I have no internet so I cannot give you an exact spot, but I'll give it a guess.

I though that the firs time Kellhus grasps TTT is as he is cut down from the tree and freed from the circumfix. If not there, then sometime close before that spot, around where he spends weeks in the Probability Trance trying to find a way out of the circumfixtion.

Barring that, to help narrow your search, he only sees the Thought after he is informed by one of his father's messengers about it, though I can't recall exactly when that is. Damn, looks like its  time for a re-read.

Also, can you post the whole quote you are referring to? I don't seem to recall that either.

Maybe I was having a bad day . It just makes me so surprised to finally read it and find out that there is better stuff out there that is so unheard of by the general public. I probably just expected too much. At any rate, its still a good book that is worth reading for anyone who thinks they like Fantasy. It just shouldn't be the be-all-end-all of the genre.