>The second situation was never as risky as the first.

But if both situations have the same outcome -- everyone not descended from the 40-pair group is dead -- does it make sense after the fact to distinguish them by "riskiness"? It seems to be a distinction without a difference, as the saying goes.

What if the surviving pool killed the other pools? In the absence of that one surviving pool, there would have been another. Or maybe even more?

>What if the surviving pool killed the other pools?

Well, what if they did?

I think that I have been incorrectly assuming that this subthread was about whether, in 2017, we could tell which of two things had happened -- either "there was a time when there were only 40 pairs of humans on all the earth", or "everyone today is descended from a 40-pair group that may have coexisted with others but for some reason those others died out."

If in fact we're instead talking about whether we can make any distinctions whatever between the two situations, even though we know now that whichever actually occurred, humanity didn't go extinct, then I retract my objections.

Oh, I was musing whether we can tell today---both in practice or in theory.

Why? If I buy hundred lottery tickets, I am at a hundred times greater 'risk' to win the lottery than if I buy only one ticket.

In either case, the most likely outcome in the end is still that I don't win the lottery. But the chances were different.

No, we already know the outcome of those groups that may or may not have existed and that is that they had no outcome on the current gene pool meaning that in essence they did not exist as far as survival goes.

In your analogy it's like buying 40 lottery tickets knowing that 39 of them will not win for sure vs buying just 1 ticket.

Sure, but you only know that after the fact. Basically, talking about `risk' after the fact is a murky business. (And can invite a lot of philosophical debate about frequentist vs Bayesian interpretations of probability. And determinism.)