As far as the sex ratio, why not 100 females, two of whom are OB/GYNs, and at least 100 different sperm samples to impregnate them later? Not to mention that by the time we can reach the stars cloning technology should be fairly refined.
I see what you did there. 
Seems like the shortest path to failure would be to rely on subject specialists who can die unexpectedly and take that entire branch of knowledge with them.
80 General citizens, all taken from the same small liberal arts college alumni roster
** 40 men between 25-40
** 40 wimmins between 25-40
** 10 others between 16 - 65: chosen without deference to age or gender: 5 with exceptional talent in a trade (carpentry, metalworking, etc) and 5 who are adept at practical application of science in a primitive world (the know what flint looks like, how to identify and smelt iron, create steel, make glass, work copper from ore into wire for a generator, etc. Oh yes, one of them has to be Bill Cosby.
Religion is ok, but not anyone who puts God before his fellow man–there’s no place for that on this mission.
I’m confused. What’s the benefit of having so much more women then men? I can understand a few percentage points, or even 60/40, but 7 women to one man? 
The more women, the more children in the next generation.
Engineers and doctors at 18-28? That’s going to be people with zero professional post-degree experience. Or are you expecting the advanced-degree types to be mostly men? :dubious:
Anyway, 100 people is a damn small breeding colony, from a genetic standpoint. Send 50 men, 50 women, and 5000 vials of frozen sperm from 5000 different donors, and require at least 1/2 of all births to be from frozen stock until it runs out; this gives you an effective starting population size of 5100 while still allowing everyone to pair up.
Selecting women who have a predisposition to twins and triplets is a terrible idea; they have a much higher rate of complications, and it’s more important to preserve the mother’s health in that first generation.
OK, seeing this;
Best sex ratio, from a genetic standpoint, is close to 50/50. This allows the most possible recombinant events in the first generation, and in the long term this will be more important than having the population expand quickly. Imagine the case where you send 99 woman and one man; everyone in all subsequent generations will get at least half their genetic material from that one man. As no-one is perfectly genetically healthy (the average person carries about 7 recessive lethal mutations, plus a few hundred less severe ones), that won’t be a good thing. Variety is key to a healthy genome.
Your population is still going to end up horribly inbred. I’d suggest that the first 10 generations or so use a planned breeding strategy (who has babies with whom) to maximize transmission of genetic diversity. (To minimize squick and resentment, this should involve artificial insemination, not bed-hopping.)
And sending them “with only the clothes on their back” isn’t going to work. Unless there’s some really sketchy “we are all descended from space aliens” shit attached to this premise, they aren’t going to be able to eat anything that’s growing on New Earth.
Well then its obvious - you send whatever prisoners are already on death row.
Are you going to search their pockets too?
Pretty expensive method of execution, though.
I send 3 men and 1 woman. If it’s good enough for Charlton Heston, who are we to argue?
Is it sad that I know what a cubit is without having to look it up?
One man can have a nigh-infinite number of offspring gestating at one time. A woman usually only has one, and the risk to the offspring increases greatly with each additional fetus. I.e., the uterus is the chokepoint in the babies-per-year equation.
All this focus on doctors and engineers, and nobody thinks to bring along day care workers and preschool teachers?
The biggest job of the colonists won’t be doctoring or engineering or lawyering, it’s going to be changing poopy diapers and wiping snotty noses and smacking screaming faces.
Oh yeah, and trying to find enough food so they don’t starve to death. I’m assuming we’re not sending along any replicators, right? So if we drop them into the wilderness of Earth 2 with the clothes on their backs, we’re looking at probably 50% mortality within the first two years, just like the colonists in North America. They’ll starve to death until they learn how to scratch food out of the wilderness and build stick huts.
Oh, another point against the extreme-female-dominated ideas: You’re going to need everyone working pretty much full time to establish this colony, and there are a lot of kinds of work that can’t or shouldn’t be done while pregnant. What’s the point in having your colony be mostly women, if a maximum of half of them can be pregnant at once anyway? Much more efficient to give all the jobs that can be done while pregnant to the women, and all the jobs that can’t be done while pregnant to the men. No, this isn’t very enlightened or egalitarian, but enlightenment and egalitarianism are luxuries that you just can’t afford when you’re trying to establish a colony from scratch with a scant hundred people.
And remember- Don’t Panic!
You’re not going to want to have all that many babies at the beginning anyway. It’s going to take time–probably several generations–to build the infrastructure necessary to support a massive population increase. In addition to all the time spent taking care of children, just consider the resources that it takes to support a large population. Rather than plan for rapid population increase, plan for a slow but steady one. I’d say a clean 50/50 split with careful controls over reproduction.
This. Also, for those that didn’t get the memo, a man ain’t just a woman who’s permanently unable to become pregnant. Not only are there some jobs that shouldn’t be done while pregnant: there are some jobs that one man can do that one woman can’t. It’s weird how many people have been assuming all through this thread that our colonists have nothing to do but breed, and a man’s only value is as a sperm donor.
I don’t know, but surely one of them has to be Cecil.
I also think one of them should be Raica Oliveira. It’s taken 70 thousand years of evolution to produce this very precious set of genes. We can’t just let them get discarded in the process.
If you keep the males to a minimum you’ll minimize the need for a large police force and prisons.
Given the terms set out they’re all going to die of starvation, so it makes little difference what sex ratio or occupations are included.
Interesting(and probable) conclusion. Is it true even if you could handpick the group for survivability? I can’t think of a time in history this type of experiment has been tried before.
Good gravy. What on earth (um, pun not intended) would inspire any woman to get on this ark? “Get on this ship because we need you to make babies. Oh, and you can’t pick the fathers, you just have to stay pregnant. Got it?”
In any case, a lot depends on how much tech is going along. If a lot, you need people who know how to operate and/or fix the tech. If little, you need people who know how to survive without it.
These numbers are so small, I wonder if the best strategy would be taking extant families–youngish couples with youngish children.