Re: Lack of insight "explains" everything with "chance"...

Day Brown wrote:
with hominids so widely, and thinly, dispersed, there'd be a lotta
inbreeding.
And with that, a lotta drift.

Jane Auel may be onto something with her notion of a summer gathering
of the clans at some particular location for the sake of genetic
diversity. But nobody wants to think of their ancestors fucking around
that much. However, if such a traditional site is ever located, it'll
be a gold mine of artifacts.

If your two parents hadn't bonded just when they did --possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond -- you wouldn't be here. And if their parents hadn't bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn't be here either. And if their parents hadn't done likewise, and their parents before them, and so on, obviously indefinitely, you wouldn't be here.
Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up. Go back just eight generations to the time that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born, and already there are over 250 people on whose timely couplings your existence depends. Continue further, to the time of Shakespeare and the Mayflower pilgrims, and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors earnestly exchanging genetic material in a way that would, eventually and miraculously, result in you.
At twenty generations ago, the number of people procreating on your behalf has risen to 1,048,576. Five generations before that, and there are no fewer than 33,554,432 men and women on whose devoted couplings your existence depends. By thirty generations ago, your total number of forebearers -- remember, these aren't cousins and aunts and other incidental relatives, but only parents and parents of parents in a line leading ineluctably to you -- is over one billion (1,073,741,824, to be precise). If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose co-operative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately on million trillion, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.
Clearly something has gone wrong with our maths here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that your line is not pure. You couldn't be here without a little incest -- actually quite a lot of incest -- albeit at a genetically discreet remove.
-- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything.
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