Charlie Bell wrote:
... and second, the
maths of evolutionary genetics is against you - while direct chromosomal
inheritance goes down exponentially by generation, family tree goes up
exponentially by generation (to within population limits). Or do you
really think you had 2,147,483.648 *individual* ancestors 30 generations
ago? No, of course not - family trees converge as well as diverge.
At the generation where you'd expect me to have 128 ancestors, I have
122. (There was a first-cousin marriage at one point, and a
second-cousin marriage at another. And on top of that, I know someone
whose closest degree of relation to me is third cousin -- but he's also
more "closely related" to me than a second cousin, because we have
kinship in other ways, as well.)
Julia
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