Genetic Engineering

There’s a saying somewhere in the Empire. Syrus doesn’t know it but his family did and the Imperial who wants him dead does. “This is why they banned jen-people. People like the Savages and the Outliers. This is why we left the First Colony. Because of freaks like you.” Talking to syrus? Original settlers on first colony from Earth didn’t have a huge population. It spread out over the planet too? So they started tinkering to deal with inbreeding. And some wanted to be better able to survive the world they landed on. So in ‘improving’ their children, they wound up creating specialized abilities

Resources for Research
http://www.orcades.ed.ac.uk/popgenetics/homozygosity.html

http://www.orcades.ed.ac.uk/popgenetics/popstructure.html

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1936-magic-number-for-space-pioneers-calculated/#.VBiC_XtDLwo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population

https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3/what-is-the-minimum-human-population-necessary-for-a-sustainable-colony

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/minimum-amount-of-people-required-for-humanity-to-survive.222509/

(higher numbers needed in colony for higher tech level-purposeful sacrifice of some tech in Navlad to be able to send people to space related jobs?)