pedigree collapse
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.29 in modern English
24
Scrabble Score
16
Letters
4
Syllables
11
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The phenomenon in which ancestral inbreeding causes the number of a descendant’s distinct ancestors to be smaller than that predicted by a binary tree (∑ᵢ₌₁ⁿ 2ⁱ, where n represents the number of generations).
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "Less well-known is the argument that we may all have a single mitochondrial foundress — not necessarily a single ancestress — owing to the likelihood of ‘lineage extinction’ and ‘pedigree collapse’ as a result of mating with cousins, small population sizes, and high mortality before reproductive age."