Just having an argument with a friend
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No. People have a lot of different kinds of traits they can pass on to kids. Those are called genes. There are dominant genes–ones that tend to manifest over others, and recessive genes–ones that don’t unless the only option from both parents are recessive genes. A lot of really bad diseases are carried as recessive genes. That’s ok when you have a lot of genetic variation because those just get hidden by the dominant genes. When you shrink the gene pool to only two people, though, suddenly those recessive genes are way more likely to get passed on to later ancestors, since there are only a few options available. The first couple’s kids might be fine, but their kids would have a much higher incidence of recessive genes.
As a result, the population begins to have all kinds of genetic defects. Those just get worse without genetic variation and the population probably dies off. There’s no agreement on how many sets of genes humans need to survive, but most would say it’s at least 50 people and probably more like 1,000 or so.
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