Re: The Forebears Paradox


"Michael" <michael.greaney@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1157284535.177582.121840@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Reading the posts to date, it appears that the problem lies in the way
I've defined incest too tightly, i.e. I've excluded the possiblity of
marrying a distant cousin.

And they can be very distant cousins indeed. In a population of 1 million
(which is about 2^20) then the nearest "cousin" has to be less than 20
generation or about 400 years. How confident are you that you and your wife
haven't got a common ancestor in the last 400 years? Do you both have full
family trees covering the last 20 generations and 1 million ancestors?

If your wife is Caucasian (as I assume you are), you can pretty much bet on
having common ancestors as a certainty. Most Europeans are related to
Europen royalty (which in turn is inter-related), basically because many of
the European Kings had lots of children.

I can bet for an
Such marriages might well have been more
frequent in the past when people didn't travel as often or as far as
they do today and consequently didn't have the contact with distant
communities to bring in fresh blood. Perhaps this is how racial
differences emerged. One could argue, then, that the existence of
different races proves the incest solution to the paradox (incest in
the loose sense of marrying distant cousins).


To some extent, yes. Every genetic racial characteristic was the result of
one or very few individuals being born with that trait, and through
intermarriage this spread through the whole community. These one or few
individuals are the ancestors of everybody sharing that genetic
characteristic (as are many other people who didn't have that
chatecteristic).

But you don't need this argument to show that intermarriage occurred. The
simple arithmetic argument you gave at ths start proved this - there simply
aren't enough ancestors around for everybody to have a completely different
set.



.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: The Forebears Paradox
    ... I've defined incest too tightly, i.e. I've excluded the possiblity of ... marrying a distant cousin. ... the loose sense of marrying distant cousins). ...
    (sci.math)
  • Re: The Forebears Paradox
    ... You have a lot of ancestors, ... have more descendants than you have ancestors. ... Incest might account for some of it; my mother and father might have ... However, this solution relies too heavily on the practise on incest, ...
    (sci.math)