Which Animal Species Would Fare Best After Noah's Ark?
Noah's Ark Sculpture in the Netherlands Photo by Centurion on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 This weekend Russell Crowe, as the lead role in Darren Aronofsky's $125 million production of Noah, will pile countless animals into a wooden ark in anticipation of a watery apocalypse. Here at Popular Science, we know that when an animal population gets cut down dramatically, there's a danger they'll suffer from inbreeding. After all, early on in repopulating the world, they may only have relatives to choose from as mates—and mating with relatives increases the risk that offspring will get two copies of dangerously mutated genes, e.g. one from mom, one from dad, and zero alternative copies for a healthy mix. Animal species differ wildly in their genetic diversity. Fruit flies, for example, have about ten times as much genetic variation as humans do. Individual nematode species are 100 times more varied....