Paul GrahamVerified account

Brooooooooaaaaaaaaaaddddddddeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrr perspective!!

As a geneticist once said to me, fewer than 50% of your ancestors were male.

This is mind-blowing, also each one of us is at most 50th level relative of any other person on earth

Hey cousin

Well, the article explains why that's not true, right? People don't marry (or really, reproduce with) random other people - there are selection effects that mean you likely have less than 128 great^5 grandparents, or at least they weren't random strangers :P

So based on your formula, where would the “Pedigree Collapse” cone converge back to 2 people? And if it’s 2500-5000 BC, doesn’t this suggest the Bible’s story of creation, over Darwin’s?

I am mostly interested in ancestors personalities, not the genetic raw material. Family is created by love and shared experience, not DNA. Even identical twins are different people with different personalities.

In the end, what does a genetic connection really mean, anyway? It is as nebulous as the concept of racial personality characteristics, no?

Not just their genes, but also their class, faith, and experiences.

Probably not true. You have 46 chromosomes. How extensive is the swapping between chromosomes during meiosis? If swapping is rare then you did not get much if anything from most of those 128 ancestors which had 128 x 46 chromosomes between them. Few made the cut.