Geneaology

  • assuming a generation is 30 years, you only have to go back to the year 1800 to have roughly 128 great^5 grand parents. In other words, in the year 1800, there were 128 people walking around who's genetic makeup would contribute to who you are today

  • "we are a product of 127 romances in the last 200 years alone"

  • when we consider how the number of grandparents increases by the power of 2 with each generation, we can see how it's not so impressive when someone says they were descended from someone famous

    • Within that top section, there’s probably some royalty, in addition to some peasants, scholars, warriors, painters, prostitutes, murderers, lunatics, and any other kind of person who existed back then.
  • if you were to pluck just one of those 128 grandparents from existence, then you yourself would never have existed

    • real number is actually lower since many have married cousins, resulting in pedigree collapse. This would have it result in a diamond shape if we went back far enough.
  • every stranger in the world is a cousin of yours, and the only question is how distant a cousin they are. The degree of cousin (first, second, etc.) is just a way of referring to how far you have to go back before you get to a common ancestor. For first cousins, you only have to go back two generations to hit your common grandparents. For second cousins, you have to go back three generations to your common great-grandparents.

  • The number of cousins you have grows exponentially as the degree of distance goes up. You may have a small number of first cousins, but you likely have hundreds of third cousins, thousands of fifth cousins, and over a million eighth cousins.

    • the numbers rise so exponentially, that assuming the world average children per family (2.36), the most distant relative that any one person has on this earth is a 15th cousin

References