Word.ws English Dictionary

pedigree collapse

pedigree collapse 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).

Noun

pedigree collapse (uncountable)

  1. (genealogy) 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).
    • 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...1989, Jonathan Benthall, “The ‘Annual Review’ 1988 Reviewed: He but There-to Come(s) No(t) / Which-Who Fear(s) Deep Water”, in Anthropology Today, V, № 5 (October 1989), page 16

Origin of pedigree collapse

Coined by Robert C. Gunderson.

Questions about pedigree collapse

What does pedigree collapse mean?
Pedigree collapse means 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).
What part of speech is pedigree collapse?
Pedigree collapse is a noun.

Words near pedigree collapse in the dictionary

  1. Pedigo
  2. Pedigos
  3. pedigree
  4. pedigree clause
  5. pedigree clauses
  6. pedigree collapse
  7. pedigreed
  8. pedigreeing
  9. pedigreeless
  10. pedigrees
  11. pedilavia

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pedigree collapse (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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