Dr. Stone is an exciting edutainment shonen anime that’s all about rebuilding human civilization from scratch after the apocalypse, and for protagonist Senku Ishigami, that means rebuilding all of humanity’s greatest inventions, from light bulbs to steam engines. The human race is also rebuilding itself genetically, but that’s a more intense and often disturbing battle for survival.
Flashback scenes in Dr. Stone depicted Senku’s foster father, Byakuya Ishigami, and five other astronauts returning to Earth after the petrification event to rebuild the human race, one generation at a time. That was a serious genetic bottleneck with uncomfortable implications, but according to some Dr. Stone fans, the reborn human race could have fought its way through the inevitable inbreeding problem and safely rebooted the gene pool, all with no technology required.
How Dr. Stone’s Ishigami Village Rebooted Its Gene Pool
Even the most casual anime fans and science enthusiasts are certain that just six people is not nearly enough to create a stable, genetically diverse human population, and the genetic defects and illnesses associated with inbreeding would become a serious problem in just a few generations. However, as Dr. Stone fans noted, the anime’s lore stretches a few factors just enough to make it vaguely plausible for the human race to survive such a genetic bottleneck after all.
To begin with, Byakuya and the other five astronauts were chosen for their ISS mission because they are strong, healthy human specimens with good genes, giving the bottlenecked population a head start. The tiny population would have few to no genetic illnesses or bad genes in it, which would stave off many of inbreeding’s worst effects, where the same genes are recycled over and over.
In this scenario, the genetic problems of inbreeding would be slowed down, but not stopped, so brutal but fair natural selection could take care of the rest. Without the benefit of modern civilization, such as medical care and technology, the reborn human race would live the way pre-civilized cavemen did, experiencing natural selection like any other species. It’s a stretch, but it’s still conceivable that if the small human population reproduced rapidly and every child with weak genes died off, then the small gene pool would be strengthened and the ill effects of inbreeding would be phased out.
Problems would still pop up across the generations, but overall, the pragmatic need for survival would ensure that the most detrimentally inbred people would die out, creating a relatively healthy gene pool for Ishigami Village. By the time Senku awoke 3,700 years later, the worst effects of inbreeding were likely already gone, so further inbreeding would have a limited impact on current generations.
Why Dr. Stone Doesn’t (But Should) Discuss Its Genetic Bottleneck Problem
Curious Dr. Stone fans can read pretty deeply into the implications of such a tiny human population and the vast time frame involved, and there are clear reasons why the anime doesn’t directly address the conspicuous inbreeding problem. Most obviously, it’s an uncomfortable topic that would disrupt the show’s optimistic and inspiring tone, and the science of genetics was never a focus in Dr. Stone, with the series instead concerning itself with STEM-style science, such as building working machines, chemistry, geology and even astronomy. The Dr. Stone anime is also edutainment, not an animated science book, so the story can and does take many liberties. It’s a compromise to make Dr. Stone an exciting shonen anime with larger-than-life adventures.
That being said, Dr. Stone still undermines its own authority with its many liberties on science, mostly concerning genetics and sustainable population sizes. Some research suggests that not even a breeding population of 500 human beings is enough to keep the gene pool healthy and avoid extinction, let alone just six. Dr. Stone implies that the astronauts’ strong, diverse genes and possibly natural selection helped keep this tiny gene pool alive, and any anime fan who totally suspends their disbelief can accept that. Still, this oversight may be one of Dr. Stone’s greatest weaknesses, letting the reborn human race cheat its way toward a viable population like Ishigami Village, which is definitely part of the “entertainment” half of “edutainment.”
It’s a shame that the entire plot of Dr. Stone hinges on a practically impossible scenario of a population of six overcoming extreme inbreeding to rebuild the human race since this is so central to the entire anime. The anime might have taken a different route, such as people in underground bunkers or submarines surviving the petrification wave to rebuild a post-apocalypse population of proper size. Fortunately, the rest of Dr. Stone is entertaining enough to distract anime fans from this genetic plot hole, and fans can fill in the gaps however they like — from brutal natural selection to borderline magic.
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