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From the Los Angeles Times:
What you can learn about marriage and migration from a 13-million member family tree
By DEBORAH NETBURN
MAR 02, 2018 | 3:20 PM… Armchair genealogists and a team of computers scientists have assembled a massive family tree that includes 13 million individual members and spans an average of 11 generations.
A study describing the tree, published this week in Science, also details some of what we can learn from this crowdsourced data. For example, it reveals when people stopped marrying their cousins, whether men or women traveled farther from home for marriage, and provides clues about how longevity is inherited. …
The researchers found that on average there was a 2% error when listing a person’s father, and a 0.3% error for a mother. …
To correct these errors the team developed computer programs that “pruned” the tree, removing invalid relationships. After doing that, they generated 5.3 million disjointed family trees — the largest of which included 13 million individuals.
… “We have much more representation of Western populations, mostly from Europe and the U.S.,” Erlich said. “And from the U.S. it is mostly from Caucasians rather than other ethnicities.” …
For example, after studying migration patterns in the tree they found that women leave their hometown more than men, but when men move, they tend to move much farther. This pattern has continued for a long time. It was true 300 years ago, and continues to be true today, the authors said.
In another line of inquiry, the data were used to determine when people stopped marrying close relations.
The researchers found that prior to 1750, most marriages in their data set occurred between people born about 6 miles from each other. After the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1870, however, that distance rapidly increased to about 60 miles.
You might think that as people traveled farther to find a spouse, they would marry people who were more distantly related to them. And indeed, that was true. Eventually.
The authors report that between 1650 and 1850 the average genetic relationship of married couples was on the order of 4th cousins. After 1850 it was on the order of 7th cousins.
But, the researchers found something strange in the data. Between 1800 and 1850 the distance couples traveled to marry each other doubled — probably because rapid transportation made railroad travel possible in most of Europe and the United States. However, that increase in distance traveled to marry someone was accompanied by an increase in genetic relatedness between marriage partners.
In other words, during this 50-year period, people traveled farther to marry closer relations.
“Families dispersed, and people started taking the train to marry their cousin,” Erlich said.
Charles Darwin marrying his first cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839 is a good example of this.
This observation implies that it was changing social norms, rather than access to rapid transit, that was the primary trigger for people to search genetically further afield than fourth cousins when it came to finding a spouse, Erlich said.
American reformers took the lead on researching cousin marriage and banning it, while the English researchers who might have spoke up on it mostly did not. Darwin, worried about his ten children’s tendency toward ill-health, he asked his son George to research it. George said there wasn’t much to worry about, so Charles clammed up on the subject.
In contrast, American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who married his first cousin in 1853, was speaking out against cousin marriage in the 1870s.
Anyway, it sounds like the researchers are interested in getting more suggestions for what to research with their vast database.
I’m interested in “pedigree collapse” — how many fewer unique ancestors do you have than you have slots in your family tree. E.g., 40 generations ago you have a trillion slots for ancestors. But there weren’t a trillion individuals alive in about 800 AD or 1000 AD.
Understanding pedigree collapse is of course immensely important for thinking more lucidly about the scientific reality of race.
And here’s my 2007 VDARE article on Pinker’s big New Republic article on genealogy.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
Also to be noted, generation times are not the same for every branch of the tree….
That's through one common Quebec ancestral couple; the other we've found puts the generations flush with each other.Replies: @JollyOldSoul, @JMcG
Regarding pedigree collapse, I am pretty sure that almost no one has 64 unique GGGG-GPs.
Even if someone is mixed-race, the chances of 64 unique ancestors at that level rises, but is still not very high.
The names of my Great^4 Grandparents are all known to me, and it's no surprise that they're all different.Replies: @Thomm
1800 to 1850 was the period of the great Western expansion, and people tended to travel in family groups to areas where there weren’t very many people around to marry.
Are the researchers doing this to follow the data wherever it might lead (like, say, validating problematic, deplorable, and thrice debunked ideas), or are they looking to help Google eventually develop a pin-camera that will scan your iris, infer your phenotype, and decide whether or not you’re allowed to comment?
First cousin is a bit too close but, beyond that, it’s fair game in my book. How many people even bear a resemblance to any of their relatives beyond the third degree?
And wasn’t there a study that showed the healthiest offspring were from third-cousin parents?
The math here isn't complicated. Looking at a first cousin marriage, for each chromosome each spouse is passing on one of a set of 8 (two from each grandparent), where 4 of those eight choice is potentially shared with their spouse. So for each chromosome pair you have a 50/50 shot of putting in your pup, a chromosome from the shared grandparents, and then a 1/8 shot that your spouse will be putting in the same one. So basically you have a 1/16th shot of a double hit. That's an average of 1.5 identical chromosome pairs in your kid.
Those matching pairs will carry some mutations. If they are deleterious ones (that don't outright cause miscarriage or quickly kill) then bad news for the kid.
Each generational step away in relatedness drops the chance of a hit by 4x. (Halves the fraction of potentially shared chromosomes, halves the chance of a match.) By 2nd cousin odds are they'll be no matched chromosome pair. 3rd cousin and it's pretty much background noise. But 1st cousins is clearly a bad choice. You'll have a significant fraction of offspring with some sort of impairment. Probably a few percent seriously screwed up.
my family had our DNA genotyped at 23andme and discovered some 4th cousins. Also realized that most 4th cousins will not actually share any DNA with each other..Since my mother and Grandmother tested it made it easier to identify my 4th cousins, as we share such a small amount of DNA with 4th cousins it is impossible to distinguish a potential 4th, 5th of 6th cousin via DNA testing.
Many of my fourth cousins share no DNA with me but share a small segment with my sister and vice versa. In fact people typically share no DNA with a 4th cousin.
Third cousins usually will share one segment of DNA, equal to less than 1% of your genome.
For ashkenazi and other inbred populations third cousins will share in excess of 3% of their DNA...and all ashkenazi will appear as 5th cousins genetically...Replies: @GW, @ben tillman
And later, whether or not you’re allowed to breed.
I think the Chinese are well on their way to a one billion person family tree. Participation in DNA collection will not be optional.
I think that they already have the complete family tree of all the Uighurs in Xinjiang. DNA and iris scans just to be sure.
I suspect that what we will learn from this is that it will be no fun to be deemed an enemy of the state.
They’re doing it to help Google develop a pin camera that will scan your iris to determine if you have any problematic ideas in your head and erase your ancestors from history if you do.
So what does this say about the claims by hbdchick and others that people were “outbreeding” significantly in the past?
That's the impact of the well documented efforts of the Catholic Church to put an end to cousin marriage starting in the 6th century. It certainly did not end the practice, but it sharply reduced it. If you want to understand what that means, think of modern Britain. Pakistanis make up 3% of the population and engage in lots of cousin marriage. They account for 30% of genetic defects in children.Replies: @Anon, @pyrrhus, @Anonymous
4th cousins is definitely "outbreeding". That's one pair of shared great-great-great grandparents. It would be hard to much further outbred than that in more or less stable farming village with low mobility (spouse from your village or surrounding villages, where your ancestors also outbred to also). 4th cousins in that context basically means "random person from my patch".
After the industrial revolution, populations exploded along with mobility. So the genetic distance of "random person from my--now much larger--patch" went up.Replies: @pyrrhus, @Anonymous, @Rosamond Vincy
Why scan the iris when you can use an anal probe instead? Anal probes would also reflect Google’s commitment to LBTQ outreach.
People doing European genealogy, at least, note that the period of marked “pedigree collapse” in that population was the mid-14th century, when the epidemic of bubonic plague – the Black Death – killed a significant percentage of the population. Survivors were few enough in many places that they could not avoid endogamous unions.
The population of the British North American colonies was small and localized in the seventeenth century, and this is another period and place in which genealogists find pedigree collapse. As an example, there are estimated to be 35 million descendants in the United States of the passengers of the Mayflower’s first voyage – far more than the present number of members of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants. The latter are just the handful that went to the trouble of doing the research necessary to prove their lineage.
Yes, I learned that I’m tenth cousin to my own kids. Even though I’m slightly older than their grandmother. And that means they’re tenth cousins once removed to themselves.
That’s through one common Quebec ancestral couple; the other we’ve found puts the generations flush with each other.
Yes. A more modern example of people traveling further to marry close relations is...Pakistanis who move to England to marry their first cousin.
Agreed. And the time frame is a tad too early for widespread rail travel.
Don’t give them ideas.
She is refering to the Catholic Church’s marriage rules and manoralism. Those are much weaker for the time period of the study.
Not sure what you mean.
Somehow I think it will be used to promote more immigration.
Men moved for economic reasons, women moved because they married a man in the next village? If you’re going to leave your family network and move for better opportunity, might as well keep going past Chicago and all the way to NYC, so to speak.
I think they’re pretty close to a 1.5 billion person family tree, unless you’ve done some pruning that I missed.
OT who wants to laugh
https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/neq3ak/people-called-me-fat-in-china
People in China thought it was okay to call me fat to my face
I can remember when, to see a 300lb woman, one had to go to the circus. Now, one just has to go to the mall.
That's through one common Quebec ancestral couple; the other we've found puts the generations flush with each other.Replies: @JollyOldSoul, @JMcG
“Charles Darwin marrying his first cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839 is a good example of this.”
Yes. A more modern example of people traveling further to marry close relations is…Pakistanis who move to England to marry their first cousin.
Even if someone is mixed-race, the chances of 64 unique ancestors at that level rises, but is still not very high.Replies: @Macumazahn, @AndrewR, @Not Raul
You’ve clearly never done any genealogical research.
The names of my Great^4 Grandparents are all known to me, and it’s no surprise that they’re all different.
Very few have 64 unique ancestors at GGGG-GP. If you want to be even more conservative, just add one more generation and it becomes almost impossible for anyone to have 128 unique ancestors at GGGGG-GP.
Remember that this article itself says that for eons, 4th cousin was the *average* marriage, meaning that third and even second-cousin marriages occasionally happened. If it recently expanded to 7th cousin (on top of rising inter-racial reproduction), that still does not undo the pre 1850 patterns as one goes further back.Replies: @Old Palo Altan
https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/neq3ak/people-called-me-fat-in-china
People in China thought it was okay to call me fat to my faceReplies: @Macumazahn, @Jim Don Bob
It’s the same way in India. I traveled there once on business, with a colleague who was monstrously fat (over 400lbs), and children would surround him shouting, “How many kilos?” I just had to suppress my laughter 🙂
I can remember when, to see a 300lb woman, one had to go to the circus. Now, one just has to go to the mall.
It says that people still struggle with concepts of “a lot” and “a little” in the current year. What matters in cousin marriage is the frequency. If you marry your first cousin, there could be genetic consequences for your kids. If your kids marry a first cousin, there will be genetic consequences for their kids.
That’s the impact of the well documented efforts of the Catholic Church to put an end to cousin marriage starting in the 6th century. It certainly did not end the practice, but it sharply reduced it. If you want to understand what that means, think of modern Britain. Pakistanis make up 3% of the population and engage in lots of cousin marriage. They account for 30% of genetic defects in children.
Basically parasites. Pay little in, get a lot out.
The claims about "outbreeding" aren't made to make a simple contrast with Pakistanis. Pakistanis are supposed to be an extreme outlier.
What is the average relationship of married Pakistanis? They have a lot of 1st cousin marriage, but presumably the average isn't exactly 1st cousins since they must have at least some marriages between people beyond 1st cousins, and brother sister marriage is presumably rare or relatively nonexistent. So this would put the average beyond 1st cousins. But even if we assume that the average is 1st cousins, this leaves 2 degrees between Pakistanis and the population of outbreeders. So now the claim is something like, the outbreeders were marrying their 4th cousins, and everyone else was marrying their 2nd and 3rd cousins, and this supposedly accurately describes and accounts for everything.Replies: @3g4me, @Almost Missouri
Many liberals are apparently fascinated by using genetic testing and genealogy to determine “who they are.”
Meanwhile they have complete belief in the axiom, “race doesn’t really exist.”
They seem to be unable to understand that each proposition refutes the other.
OT
And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently
One of the most striking breakdowns of family tree is in the ancestry of Jesus the son of Joseph the Carpenter, also a.k.a the Son of God.
One one side of the family he is an 40th generation descendant of King David, but on the other side there are only 29 generations. And then you have the whole complex issue of the Virgin Birth, which may invalidate the line of descent according to Luke which goes through Mary’s husband Joseph Carpenter.
You might question the reliability of the accounts, but in this case they are Gospel and thus unimpeachable.
God is a bachelor, and is not known to have any other offspring.
You have a noticeable predilection for bringing Jesus and Christianity into the most tenuously related comment threads, choosing and exaggerating whatever feature of belief or tradition that you regard as the most unbelievable or ridiculous, in order to mock it. Despite your belief in your own subtlety and erudition, your comments display neither. Rather, they amply demonstrate your implacable animus against people of Christian faith, despite your choosing to live amongst so many in nations they created, rather than settling in your own (((people's))) homeland.
I wonder what is the incidence of people entering into gay marriages with first cousins. Had my grandmother married her female cousin, it would have prevented a lot of problems related to the inheritance of the family business or renting out horses, later buses, which split the family for generations.
Worth it for the others in the family no doubt, but for you?Replies: @Anonymous
There are those who insist the Iceland fertility optimum around the third/fourth cousin level of consanguinity was some sort of statistical fluke. However, this starts to smell like confirmation.
Do they take DNA samples of people convicted of crimes?
Seems kind of obvious for a number of reasons, but also pretty obvious that the usual people would file the usual lawsuits against such a practice. (And would they be right? Dunno, have to think about it).
Anyway seems like that would be a sizeable and very interesting group to have DNA data on.
That's through one common Quebec ancestral couple; the other we've found puts the generations flush with each other.Replies: @JollyOldSoul, @JMcG
My brother married our 4th cousin. So I’m an uncle to his kids as well as a 4th cousin once removed. I think that means I’m a closer relation to his children than I am to my own.
https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/212170668-Average-percent-DNA-shared-between-relativesReplies: @JMcG, @ben tillman
That's the impact of the well documented efforts of the Catholic Church to put an end to cousin marriage starting in the 6th century. It certainly did not end the practice, but it sharply reduced it. If you want to understand what that means, think of modern Britain. Pakistanis make up 3% of the population and engage in lots of cousin marriage. They account for 30% of genetic defects in children.Replies: @Anon, @pyrrhus, @Anonymous
Do pakis pay 30% of the taxes funding the NHS? No way. Yet half the time you go there it is a useless paki doctor who can barely speak English. I get the impression they are on the make as middlemen minorities; you have to be dying before they give treatment. My gut tells me they give the best referrals and treatment to their co-ethnics.
Basically parasites. Pay little in, get a lot out.
Even if someone is mixed-race, the chances of 64 unique ancestors at that level rises, but is still not very high.Replies: @Macumazahn, @AndrewR, @Not Raul
If you’re from a community where few people have gone in or out in centuries, yes the chances are high that your parents are at least fourth-cousins. In fact, my best friend is from a rural town in GA and his parents are second-cousins. Of course, they have always known it.
I think most Americans are descended from more recently restless stock. My parents have both lived their entire lives in the same rust belt city but three of my four grandparents were born out of the state, as were all of my great-grandparents (one of whom was an immigrant/settler). And I don’t think my family is all that unique in this regard.
That would be an interesting tool in the estate planners’ drawer.
Steve: I have a rather complete family tree. On my dad’s side, which was Amish-Mennonite, there are only two instances of cousin marriage in the past 8-10 generations. Two pairs of third cousins married. Both happened around 7 generations ago in the late 1700’s in rural Pennsylvania.
Not much pedigree collapse, despite the supposed reputation of the Amish (which isn’t true). The real issue with Amish genetics is an overall lack of genetic diversity from a very limited founding population, not a propensity to marry close cousins.
Funny story, my brother-in-law met his wife at college, she was from way down South, he from Pennsylvania. Many years later after they were married they discovered while discussing distant family that they are 3rd cousins.
And wasn't there a study that showed the healthiest offspring were from third-cousin parents?Replies: @AnotherDad, @Travis, @TWS
Yep.
George was wrong.
The math here isn’t complicated. Looking at a first cousin marriage, for each chromosome each spouse is passing on one of a set of 8 (two from each grandparent), where 4 of those eight choice is potentially shared with their spouse. So for each chromosome pair you have a 50/50 shot of putting in your pup, a chromosome from the shared grandparents, and then a 1/8 shot that your spouse will be putting in the same one. So basically you have a 1/16th shot of a double hit. That’s an average of 1.5 identical chromosome pairs in your kid.
Those matching pairs will carry some mutations. If they are deleterious ones (that don’t outright cause miscarriage or quickly kill) then bad news for the kid.
Each generational step away in relatedness drops the chance of a hit by 4x. (Halves the fraction of potentially shared chromosomes, halves the chance of a match.) By 2nd cousin odds are they’ll be no matched chromosome pair. 3rd cousin and it’s pretty much background noise. But 1st cousins is clearly a bad choice. You’ll have a significant fraction of offspring with some sort of impairment. Probably a few percent seriously screwed up.
And wasn't there a study that showed the healthiest offspring were from third-cousin parents?Replies: @AnotherDad, @Travis, @TWS
true…few Americans know the surnames of their 16 Great Great Grandparents…….most of us do not even know any of our third cousins.
my family had our DNA genotyped at 23andme and discovered some 4th cousins. Also realized that most 4th cousins will not actually share any DNA with each other..Since my mother and Grandmother tested it made it easier to identify my 4th cousins, as we share such a small amount of DNA with 4th cousins it is impossible to distinguish a potential 4th, 5th of 6th cousin via DNA testing.
Many of my fourth cousins share no DNA with me but share a small segment with my sister and vice versa. In fact people typically share no DNA with a 4th cousin.
Third cousins usually will share one segment of DNA, equal to less than 1% of your genome.
For ashkenazi and other inbred populations third cousins will share in excess of 3% of their DNA…and all ashkenazi will appear as 5th cousins genetically…
Folks we gotta figure this one out.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
Why you think that contradicts hbdchick?
4th cousins is definitely “outbreeding”. That’s one pair of shared great-great-great grandparents. It would be hard to much further outbred than that in more or less stable farming village with low mobility (spouse from your village or surrounding villages, where your ancestors also outbred to also). 4th cousins in that context basically means “random person from my patch”.
After the industrial revolution, populations exploded along with mobility. So the genetic distance of “random person from my–now much larger–patch” went up.
And wasn't there a study that showed the healthiest offspring were from third-cousin parents?Replies: @AnotherDad, @Travis, @TWS
My wife has second cousins who married. They were previously married to other people and had two and three children respectively. They had miscarriage after miscarriage and quit trying after three. They were in their thirties.
Interesting - and sad - anecdote, but it should be noted that miscarriage probabilities increase throughout a woman's fourth decade, regardless of the mother's relationship to the father.Replies: @TWS
So Darwin kept quiet about the obviously negative consequences of cousin marriage, because he married his first cousin……All science is personal!
4th cousins is definitely "outbreeding". That's one pair of shared great-great-great grandparents. It would be hard to much further outbred than that in more or less stable farming village with low mobility (spouse from your village or surrounding villages, where your ancestors also outbred to also). 4th cousins in that context basically means "random person from my patch".
After the industrial revolution, populations exploded along with mobility. So the genetic distance of "random person from my--now much larger--patch" went up.Replies: @pyrrhus, @Anonymous, @Rosamond Vincy
Yes, according to 23andMe, 4th cousins will have, on average, about .5 % overlapping DNA, which is really insignificant…
That's the impact of the well documented efforts of the Catholic Church to put an end to cousin marriage starting in the 6th century. It certainly did not end the practice, but it sharply reduced it. If you want to understand what that means, think of modern Britain. Pakistanis make up 3% of the population and engage in lots of cousin marriage. They account for 30% of genetic defects in children.Replies: @Anon, @pyrrhus, @Anonymous
A recent British study found that marriage between first cousins reduced IQ, on average, by almost 5 points…That’s a lot.
odds are you share little to zero DNA with your 4th cousin….on average we share just .2% of our DNA with a 4th cousin, but 50% of 4th cousins share no DNA segments.
https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/212170668-Average-percent-DNA-shared-between-relatives
Thanks again
One one side of the family he is an 40th generation descendant of King David, but on the other side there are only 29 generations. And then you have the whole complex issue of the Virgin Birth, which may invalidate the line of descent according to Luke which goes through Mary's husband Joseph Carpenter.
You might question the reliability of the accounts, but in this case they are Gospel and thus unimpeachable.
God is a bachelor, and is not known to have any other offspring.Replies: @3g4me, @Rosamond Vincy
@26 Jonathan Mason: “One of the most striking breakdowns of family tree is in the ancestry of Jesus the son of Joseph the Carpenter, also a.k.a the Son of God.”
You have a noticeable predilection for bringing Jesus and Christianity into the most tenuously related comment threads, choosing and exaggerating whatever feature of belief or tradition that you regard as the most unbelievable or ridiculous, in order to mock it. Despite your belief in your own subtlety and erudition, your comments display neither. Rather, they amply demonstrate your implacable animus against people of Christian faith, despite your choosing to live amongst so many in nations they created, rather than settling in your own (((people’s))) homeland.
When discussing family history with my husband’s late aunt, she mentioned that two individuals on his extensive Italian side had apparently been dating and gotten fairly serious until they discovered they were 3rd cousins and were freaked out by the thought, and quickly broke up.
As others have noted, being genetically related at the 3rd or 4th cousin level for one or two sets of individuals within a family is not particularly close nor necessarily genetically deleterious – nor uncommon in smaller communities or during an age of hazardous travel. Rather, the problem arises with repeated 1st and/or 2nd cousin marriage by multiple siblings within two already related families, for repeated generations (as is quite common among many Mohammedans, particularly Pakistanis). I found very rare cases of 1st or 2nd cousin marriage when researching all the Italian immigrants from the village from whence came one of my husband’s great grandfathers. Although I found a lot of surnames cropping up again and again, it was usually 3rd or 4th cousin relatedness or perhaps 2nd cousin once removed. Often Ancestry will note, per my tree, that someone is the “uncle of the brother-in-law of the sister of the 1st cousin” or something similar. Thus we see a pattern of community relatedness rather than close family interbreeding – a totally different animal and one that closely echoes the definition of “nation” or “race” as genetic family writ large.
When researching my mother’s family, I found and spoke with one of her 2nd cousins whose parents were the children of a married unrelated couple (i.e. genetically unrelated but the widowed grandparents married one another when the future bride (2nd cousin’s mother) was 17 and her husband-to-be (son of 2nd cousin’s mother’s 2nd husband) was 26). A bit unusual but again, no genetic relationship involved.
OT
By Danielle Zoellner For UK Dailymail __ https://tinyurl.com/yb5pt9cs
Published: 00:46 EST, 3 March 2018 | Updated: 07:51 EST, 3 March 2018
‘I feel like we’re worse than the homeless’: Inside the impoverished communities of THOUSANDS living in Winnebagos across LA
Thousands of people are using campers as makeshift homes as housing prices continue to rise in California
Sharon Manley, 77, and Kraig Goins, 58, have been living together in motor homes for the last 15 years
Diamond Haynes, who is in her 30s, was forced into living in a camper after her apartment burned down
Dee Timmons moved into a camper after her divorced parents lost their homes in the 2008 recession
Thousands of people in Los Angeles, California, are living in battered Winnebagos and motor homes as residences to avoid living on the street.
These recreational vehicles serve as a cheaper options for those with lower incomes as the housing market continues to skyrocket year after year.
The 2017 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count recorded 4,545 campers and RVs in L.A. that could serve as makeshift homes, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The newspaper investigated these areas to discover the hidden homeless that are living inside these impoverished communities.
https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/neq3ak/people-called-me-fat-in-china
People in China thought it was okay to call me fat to my faceReplies: @Macumazahn, @Jim Don Bob
Had your grandmother “married” her female cousin (or indeed anyone else besides the man she did marry) you wouldn’t be here to benefit from the lack of problems related to the family business.
Worth it for the others in the family no doubt, but for you?
The catholic church prohibited cousin marriages during the so-called dark ages, sometimes out to the fourth degree. Saw an (unsourced) estimate that 80 per cent of marriages have been consanguineous. My twenty-three and me overlap with third and fourth cousins is tiny.
That's the impact of the well documented efforts of the Catholic Church to put an end to cousin marriage starting in the 6th century. It certainly did not end the practice, but it sharply reduced it. If you want to understand what that means, think of modern Britain. Pakistanis make up 3% of the population and engage in lots of cousin marriage. They account for 30% of genetic defects in children.Replies: @Anon, @pyrrhus, @Anonymous
What counts as “a lot” and “a little”?
The claims about “outbreeding” aren’t made to make a simple contrast with Pakistanis. Pakistanis are supposed to be an extreme outlier.
What is the average relationship of married Pakistanis? They have a lot of 1st cousin marriage, but presumably the average isn’t exactly 1st cousins since they must have at least some marriages between people beyond 1st cousins, and brother sister marriage is presumably rare or relatively nonexistent. So this would put the average beyond 1st cousins. But even if we assume that the average is 1st cousins, this leaves 2 degrees between Pakistanis and the population of outbreeders. So now the claim is something like, the outbreeders were marrying their 4th cousins, and everyone else was marrying their 2nd and 3rd cousins, and this supposedly accurately describes and accounts for everything.
Cousin marriage has been occurring in Pakistan for multiple generations. and current estimates are that 70% of all marriages are between 1st cousins. I don't know what you consider "a lot," but that is a huge percent of all marriages .
Per Wikipedia: "A rough estimate shows that close to half of all Muslims in the world are inbred: In Pakistan, 70 percent of all marriages are between first cousins (so-called "consanguinity") and in Turkey the amount is between 25-30 percent.[11]
Statistical research on Arabic countries shows that up to 34 percent of all marriages in Algiers are consanguine (blood related), 46 percent in Bahrain, 33 percent in Egypt, 80 percent in Nubia (southern area in Egypt), 60 percent in Iraq, 64 percent in Jordan, 64 percent in Kuwait, 42 percent in Lebanon, 48 percent in Libya, 47 percent in Mauritania, 54 percent in Qatar, 67 percent in Saudi Arabia, 63 percent in Sudan, 40 percent in Syria, 39 percent in Tunisia, 54 percent in the United Arabic Emirates and 45 percent in Yemen."
In other words you have to look some distance vertically as well as horizontally in the family tree to see how deleteriously inbred any given marriage is.
If for some reason the genealogies of prospective citizens are unavailable to you--say because they come from a country with unreliable records and corrupt officials--just adopt this handy shorthand: cousin-marrying cultures are incompatible with a welfare state. Never mix the two.
Seems kind of obvious for a number of reasons, but also pretty obvious that the usual people would file the usual lawsuits against such a practice. (And would they be right? Dunno, have to think about it).
Anyway seems like that would be a sizeable and very interesting group to have DNA data on.Replies: @Polynikes, @Grace Jones
Many states do and enter the DNA into a large database to help solve cold cases. They typically only take DNA samples from felons though.
4th cousins is definitely "outbreeding". That's one pair of shared great-great-great grandparents. It would be hard to much further outbred than that in more or less stable farming village with low mobility (spouse from your village or surrounding villages, where your ancestors also outbred to also). 4th cousins in that context basically means "random person from my patch".
After the industrial revolution, populations exploded along with mobility. So the genetic distance of "random person from my--now much larger--patch" went up.Replies: @pyrrhus, @Anonymous, @Rosamond Vincy
hbdchick and others generally don’t make specific enough claims to contradict. They speak of outbreeding in vague, general terms. Before this study, they probably would not have considered 4th cousin marriage to be “outbreeding”, especially depending on the population, like for example Italians or something.
So, is 1st cousin marriage bad? Or is it that the state wants to discourage it because the state wants to weaken family clans?
While the Catholic Church certainly had a vested interest in weakening rival political families/clans, restrictions on various degrees of consanguinity were a feature of Roman society, and the West inherited these plus added the religious component. Particularly given constant immigration to America (albeit of White Europeans) and frequent moving and exploration, even in the beginning, very very few Americans are interbred to the degree that would cause any regular pattern of genetic abnormalities.
However, surprisingly, most states do not legally forbid cousin marriage and, considering the millions of Mohammedan and African immigrants since 1965 and their repeating their marriage habits here, there are increasing problems. Rhode Island has a law specifically authorizing uncle/niece marriage among Jews (as prescribed in their Torah) and recently New York also set a precedent for allowing such unions among various third worlders.
tl;dr: NO, it is NOT a good idea.
With $7.8 billion in the bank, can’t Patrick Soon-Shiong afford to hire a couple of copy editors? This was in the lede.
The names of my Great^4 Grandparents are all known to me, and it's no surprise that they're all different.Replies: @Thomm
All 64 if them? Are you sure? I doubt it.
Very few have 64 unique ancestors at GGGG-GP. If you want to be even more conservative, just add one more generation and it becomes almost impossible for anyone to have 128 unique ancestors at GGGGG-GP.
Remember that this article itself says that for eons, 4th cousin was the *average* marriage, meaning that third and even second-cousin marriages occasionally happened. If it recently expanded to 7th cousin (on top of rising inter-racial reproduction), that still does not undo the pre 1850 patterns as one goes further back.
If it mean that all 128 5G's GPs are 128 different people, then it is entirely possible (in my own case for example). But if it means that none of them are related to one another to, say, the third degree, then I would agree with you that it is very unlikely.Replies: @Thomm
Steve Sailer said :
I’m interested in “pedigree collapse” — how many fewer unique ancestors do you have than you have slots in your family tree. E.g., 40 generations ago you have a trillion slots for ancestors. But there weren’t a trillion individuals alive in about 800 AD or 1000 AD.
Since prominent men had many wives and many offspring, pedigree collapse centers around them. Hence, it becomes inevitable that :
1) All people with European ancestry today (which thus includes almost all New World Hispanics and Blacks) are descended from Charlemagne.
2) Almost all Eurasians are descended from Genghis Khan (who, despite not being that far back in time, had an extreme cornering on reproduction across a wide range of Eurasia).
3) All Europeans *and* all Muslims are descendants of Muhammad.
4) Almost all humans are descendants of Confucius (only the most isolated uncontacted peoples are possible exceptions).
Where’s Razib Khan when you need him?
Worth it for the others in the family no doubt, but for you?Replies: @Anonymous
Was this before or after they invented the turkey baster?
So this brings up the following question: If a couple gets married in Arkansas, moves to Oklahoma and then gets a divorce, would they still be first cousins?
That I am actually black?
Even if someone is mixed-race, the chances of 64 unique ancestors at that level rises, but is still not very high.Replies: @Macumazahn, @AndrewR, @Not Raul
Speak for yourself, Moishe.
Same here. All 8 great-grandparents were born outside the state (half out of the country), and 14 of 16 great-great-grandparents were born out of the country (6 different countries). The chances of any of them being close cousins are quite small.
Oddly enough, I’m also descended from several Mayflower families.
Very few people have 64 unique GGGG-GPs. Queen Elizabeth certainly does not.
Even if you want to quibble with that, just one more generation makes it virtually impossible. I doubt anyone has 128 unique GGGGG-GPs.
Remember, it is exponential. Most people do indeed have 16 unique GG-GPs, yet at the same time, almost no one has 64 unique GGGG-GPs.Replies: @Steve Sailer
It seems likely that Elizabeth Warren could research into 13 million ancestors and still fail to find her Cherokee princess GGG Grandmother.
my family had our DNA genotyped at 23andme and discovered some 4th cousins. Also realized that most 4th cousins will not actually share any DNA with each other..Since my mother and Grandmother tested it made it easier to identify my 4th cousins, as we share such a small amount of DNA with 4th cousins it is impossible to distinguish a potential 4th, 5th of 6th cousin via DNA testing.
Many of my fourth cousins share no DNA with me but share a small segment with my sister and vice versa. In fact people typically share no DNA with a 4th cousin.
Third cousins usually will share one segment of DNA, equal to less than 1% of your genome.
For ashkenazi and other inbred populations third cousins will share in excess of 3% of their DNA...and all ashkenazi will appear as 5th cousins genetically...Replies: @GW, @ben tillman
Wait a second I thought we shared 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees and now you’re saying we share 0% of our DNA with our 4th cousins?
Folks we gotta figure this one out.
In the first example (that of 4th cousins), "sharing DNA" is being used as a shorthand for percent blood-relatedness. Fourth cousins are the GGG-grandchildren of the same set of GGG-grandparents, which means that they share a 1/64th blood fraction with one another, or about 1.5%.
Darwinists (I am not one) who gleefully assert that we humans share 99% of our DNA with bonobos mean something else. What they mean by "sharing DNA" is that, of the particular proteins found present in both species, the DNA that constructs those proteins uses the same genetic sequence in 99 cases out of a hundred.
If the definition from the second instance were applied to the first, it would be found that 4th cousins "shared" virtually 100% of their DNA with each other, with the differences between them being both minuscule and irrelevant.
What this all means is really nothing, but it is subjectively very important to the mindset of contemporary Darwinists who assume that identical protein templates imply common descent. While it may be pedantic, it is still often necessary to enumerate some of the ways in which this implication is under-determined.
1. Identical proteins can be assembled from different DNA sequences. This much is uncontroversial, but eo ipso it destabilizes the causal linkage; for it means that even when the identical DNA sequence and the identical protein are found in two distinct species, it is not thereby proven that the same sequence constructs the same protein in each case. It would still have to be empirically affirmed that it actually does so.
2. Identical DNA sequences can assemble different proteins, depending on how they are regulated. This also is uncontroversial, but it means that the organism is something distinct from its DNA. This is empirically established by the fact of genetic clones displaying sometimes rather obvious phenotypic variations. In many cases, the problems of gene expression and protein folding are intractable.
3. Identical DNA sequences can be acquired by means other than common descent. Such means include, but are not limited to, manifold degrees of chimerical appropriation and environmental constraints.
Taken together, these three considerations entail that there is no strict 1:1:1 correspondence between DNA, proteins, and descent, despite the attractiveness and prima facie plausibility of the whole idea. Descent is the subjective element that the Darwinist can only read into the data; it cannot be read out of it. The fact that life actualizes itself thus is consistent with any theory of origins and therefore cannot dispose between them. For the intellect of man, the origin of life and its division into various forms is a given fact of which the "why", the "how", and the "whence" are mysteries we can do nothing more than accept.
Darwinism makes a superficial attempt to obliterate the mystery by imposing upon the brute facts a system of material causality developed along the fitness principle. That it appeared to explain the ineffable was the secret of its popularity. While a skilled ontologist would always have been able to see that Darwinism was a nonstarter, there are not many such people in any era; and as far as hypotheses go, Darwinism, while being shallow and materialistic, is at least endowed with an impressive consistency that the men of an earlier generation could have held up as a triumph of their reason and creativity. But for us today, to cling to such an idea is mere provincialism. It evinces a slackening of the will to discover and to know the essences of things, a lack of that encyclopedic command of facts which the savants of the 18th century had in abundance.
The task before us today, the greatest and necessarily the last task that Western science will ever have, is to do away with this system of superficial causality and put in its place a pure physiognomic of nature, a devastating skepticism that will penetrate all things by taking them exactly as it finds them. It was this that the great Leibniz foresaw from the immense distance of centuries. Rare is he today, though, who can incorporate the fact, ever-present but of necessity suppressed, that the most exacting science will issue, must issue at last, in expressions of ultimate and conclusory agnosticism.
However much the up-to-date rationalist will lament it, so it is.Replies: @ben tillman, @Almost Missouri
I have to admit I am fascinated by Mayflower geneology. It’s kind of amazing to think tens of millions of people are descended from the few dozen Mayflower passengers with living descendants today.
Wait… Your wife and that couple are all second cousins?
Interesting – and sad – anecdote, but it should be noted that miscarriage probabilities increase throughout a woman’s fourth decade, regardless of the mother’s relationship to the father.
Interrogate the database!
The claims about "outbreeding" aren't made to make a simple contrast with Pakistanis. Pakistanis are supposed to be an extreme outlier.
What is the average relationship of married Pakistanis? They have a lot of 1st cousin marriage, but presumably the average isn't exactly 1st cousins since they must have at least some marriages between people beyond 1st cousins, and brother sister marriage is presumably rare or relatively nonexistent. So this would put the average beyond 1st cousins. But even if we assume that the average is 1st cousins, this leaves 2 degrees between Pakistanis and the population of outbreeders. So now the claim is something like, the outbreeders were marrying their 4th cousins, and everyone else was marrying their 2nd and 3rd cousins, and this supposedly accurately describes and accounts for everything.Replies: @3g4me, @Almost Missouri
@ 49 Anonymous: “What counts as “a lot” and “a little”? . . . What is the average relationship of married Pakistanis? They have a lot of 1st cousin marriage, but presumably the average isn’t exactly 1st cousins since they must have at least some marriages between people beyond 1st cousins . . . ”
Cousin marriage has been occurring in Pakistan for multiple generations. and current estimates are that 70% of all marriages are between 1st cousins. I don’t know what you consider “a lot,” but that is a huge percent of all marriages .
Per Wikipedia: “A rough estimate shows that close to half of all Muslims in the world are inbred: In Pakistan, 70 percent of all marriages are between first cousins (so-called “consanguinity”) and in Turkey the amount is between 25-30 percent.[11]
Statistical research on Arabic countries shows that up to 34 percent of all marriages in Algiers are consanguine (blood related), 46 percent in Bahrain, 33 percent in Egypt, 80 percent in Nubia (southern area in Egypt), 60 percent in Iraq, 64 percent in Jordan, 64 percent in Kuwait, 42 percent in Lebanon, 48 percent in Libya, 47 percent in Mauritania, 54 percent in Qatar, 67 percent in Saudi Arabia, 63 percent in Sudan, 40 percent in Syria, 39 percent in Tunisia, 54 percent in the United Arabic Emirates and 45 percent in Yemen.”
https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/212170668-Average-percent-DNA-shared-between-relativesReplies: @JMcG, @ben tillman
Thank you, it was more a joke I use in the family than a serious concern. I did not realize the amount of shared Dna could be so small though!
Thanks again
The claims about "outbreeding" aren't made to make a simple contrast with Pakistanis. Pakistanis are supposed to be an extreme outlier.
What is the average relationship of married Pakistanis? They have a lot of 1st cousin marriage, but presumably the average isn't exactly 1st cousins since they must have at least some marriages between people beyond 1st cousins, and brother sister marriage is presumably rare or relatively nonexistent. So this would put the average beyond 1st cousins. But even if we assume that the average is 1st cousins, this leaves 2 degrees between Pakistanis and the population of outbreeders. So now the claim is something like, the outbreeders were marrying their 4th cousins, and everyone else was marrying their 2nd and 3rd cousins, and this supposedly accurately describes and accounts for everything.Replies: @3g4me, @Almost Missouri
While an average marriage in the current generation may be further out than first cousin, you have to consider that if the previous generations’ marriages where also somewhat consanguineous (and in cousin-marrying cultures they generally are), that means that even apparently second- or third-cousin marriages may in fact have no more great-grandparents than first-cousin marriages in otherwise non-consanguineous cultures.
In other words you have to look some distance vertically as well as horizontally in the family tree to see how deleteriously inbred any given marriage is.
If for some reason the genealogies of prospective citizens are unavailable to you–say because they come from a country with unreliable records and corrupt officials–just adopt this handy shorthand: cousin-marrying cultures are incompatible with a welfare state. Never mix the two.
@52 George: A very rare 1st cousin marriage isn’t necessarily “bad,” although it does significantly increase the chance of deleterious genetic mutations. The problem is repeated cousin marriage (particularly the Mohammedan pattern of a girl marrying her father’s brother’s son) among multiple members of a family and repeated generation after generation.
While the Catholic Church certainly had a vested interest in weakening rival political families/clans, restrictions on various degrees of consanguinity were a feature of Roman society, and the West inherited these plus added the religious component. Particularly given constant immigration to America (albeit of White Europeans) and frequent moving and exploration, even in the beginning, very very few Americans are interbred to the degree that would cause any regular pattern of genetic abnormalities.
However, surprisingly, most states do not legally forbid cousin marriage and, considering the millions of Mohammedan and African immigrants since 1965 and their repeating their marriage habits here, there are increasing problems. Rhode Island has a law specifically authorizing uncle/niece marriage among Jews (as prescribed in their Torah) and recently New York also set a precedent for allowing such unions among various third worlders.
tl;dr: NO, it is NOT a good idea.
Your average Google employee doesn’t require a great deal of encouragement to begin thinking about sodomy.
One one side of the family he is an 40th generation descendant of King David, but on the other side there are only 29 generations. And then you have the whole complex issue of the Virgin Birth, which may invalidate the line of descent according to Luke which goes through Mary's husband Joseph Carpenter.
You might question the reliability of the accounts, but in this case they are Gospel and thus unimpeachable.
God is a bachelor, and is not known to have any other offspring.Replies: @3g4me, @Rosamond Vincy
– CS Lewis
4th cousins is definitely "outbreeding". That's one pair of shared great-great-great grandparents. It would be hard to much further outbred than that in more or less stable farming village with low mobility (spouse from your village or surrounding villages, where your ancestors also outbred to also). 4th cousins in that context basically means "random person from my patch".
After the industrial revolution, populations exploded along with mobility. So the genetic distance of "random person from my--now much larger--patch" went up.Replies: @pyrrhus, @Anonymous, @Rosamond Vincy
After the Norman invasion, there would have been a LOT of interbreeding with Anglo-Saxons–not necessarily mutually approved, but it would have expanded the gene pool.
I fully agree that you have 16 unique GG-GPs, and probably 32 unique GGG-GPs. But after that, it becomes exponentially less likely that pedigree collapse is avoided.
Very few people have 64 unique GGGG-GPs. Queen Elizabeth certainly does not.
Even if you want to quibble with that, just one more generation makes it virtually impossible. I doubt anyone has 128 unique GGGGG-GPs.
Remember, it is exponential. Most people do indeed have 16 unique GG-GPs, yet at the same time, almost no one has 64 unique GGGG-GPs.
Folks we gotta figure this one out.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
This is a result of equivocation, of different people meaning different things by “sharing DNA.”
In the first example (that of 4th cousins), “sharing DNA” is being used as a shorthand for percent blood-relatedness. Fourth cousins are the GGG-grandchildren of the same set of GGG-grandparents, which means that they share a 1/64th blood fraction with one another, or about 1.5%.
Darwinists (I am not one) who gleefully assert that we humans share 99% of our DNA with bonobos mean something else. What they mean by “sharing DNA” is that, of the particular proteins found present in both species, the DNA that constructs those proteins uses the same genetic sequence in 99 cases out of a hundred.
If the definition from the second instance were applied to the first, it would be found that 4th cousins “shared” virtually 100% of their DNA with each other, with the differences between them being both minuscule and irrelevant.
What this all means is really nothing, but it is subjectively very important to the mindset of contemporary Darwinists who assume that identical protein templates imply common descent. While it may be pedantic, it is still often necessary to enumerate some of the ways in which this implication is under-determined.
1. Identical proteins can be assembled from different DNA sequences. This much is uncontroversial, but eo ipso it destabilizes the causal linkage; for it means that even when the identical DNA sequence and the identical protein are found in two distinct species, it is not thereby proven that the same sequence constructs the same protein in each case. It would still have to be empirically affirmed that it actually does so.
2. Identical DNA sequences can assemble different proteins, depending on how they are regulated. This also is uncontroversial, but it means that the organism is something distinct from its DNA. This is empirically established by the fact of genetic clones displaying sometimes rather obvious phenotypic variations. In many cases, the problems of gene expression and protein folding are intractable.
3. Identical DNA sequences can be acquired by means other than common descent. Such means include, but are not limited to, manifold degrees of chimerical appropriation and environmental constraints.
Taken together, these three considerations entail that there is no strict 1:1:1 correspondence between DNA, proteins, and descent, despite the attractiveness and prima facie plausibility of the whole idea. Descent is the subjective element that the Darwinist can only read into the data; it cannot be read out of it. The fact that life actualizes itself thus is consistent with any theory of origins and therefore cannot dispose between them. For the intellect of man, the origin of life and its division into various forms is a given fact of which the “why”, the “how”, and the “whence” are mysteries we can do nothing more than accept.
Darwinism makes a superficial attempt to obliterate the mystery by imposing upon the brute facts a system of material causality developed along the fitness principle. That it appeared to explain the ineffable was the secret of its popularity. While a skilled ontologist would always have been able to see that Darwinism was a nonstarter, there are not many such people in any era; and as far as hypotheses go, Darwinism, while being shallow and materialistic, is at least endowed with an impressive consistency that the men of an earlier generation could have held up as a triumph of their reason and creativity. But for us today, to cling to such an idea is mere provincialism. It evinces a slackening of the will to discover and to know the essences of things, a lack of that encyclopedic command of facts which the savants of the 18th century had in abundance.
The task before us today, the greatest and necessarily the last task that Western science will ever have, is to do away with this system of superficial causality and put in its place a pure physiognomic of nature, a devastating skepticism that will penetrate all things by taking them exactly as it finds them. It was this that the great Leibniz foresaw from the immense distance of centuries. Rare is he today, though, who can incorporate the fact, ever-present but of necessity suppressed, that the most exacting science will issue, must issue at last, in expressions of ultimate and conclusory agnosticism.
However much the up-to-date rationalist will lament it, so it is.
You lost me a little in the last big paragraph.
What is "a pure physiognomic of nature"? And how do you know that it "must issue at last, in expressions of ultimate and conclusory agnosticism"?Replies: @Old Palo Altan
Seems kind of obvious for a number of reasons, but also pretty obvious that the usual people would file the usual lawsuits against such a practice. (And would they be right? Dunno, have to think about it).
Anyway seems like that would be a sizeable and very interesting group to have DNA data on.Replies: @Polynikes, @Grace Jones
Forensic DNA tests and ancestry tests are completely different tests. Ancestry tests use single nucleotide polymorphism markers while the police tests use short tandem repeat markers.
I guess it’s like claiming descent from Pocahontas; lots of these people are wrong.
Very few people have 64 unique GGGG-GPs. Queen Elizabeth certainly does not.
Even if you want to quibble with that, just one more generation makes it virtually impossible. I doubt anyone has 128 unique GGGGG-GPs.
Remember, it is exponential. Most people do indeed have 16 unique GG-GPs, yet at the same time, almost no one has 64 unique GGGG-GPs.Replies: @Steve Sailer
I think Charles Darwin had something like 15 unique gg-grandparents out of 16 or 31 unique ggg-grandparents out of 32. Then he married his first cousin so his children were more inbred.
Very few have 64 unique ancestors at GGGG-GP. If you want to be even more conservative, just add one more generation and it becomes almost impossible for anyone to have 128 unique ancestors at GGGGG-GP.
Remember that this article itself says that for eons, 4th cousin was the *average* marriage, meaning that third and even second-cousin marriages occasionally happened. If it recently expanded to 7th cousin (on top of rising inter-racial reproduction), that still does not undo the pre 1850 patterns as one goes further back.Replies: @Old Palo Altan
How is “unique ancestor” being defined here?
If it mean that all 128 5G’s GPs are 128 different people, then it is entirely possible (in my own case for example). But if it means that none of them are related to one another to, say, the third degree, then I would agree with you that it is very unlikely.
Are you sure all 128 of your 5G-GPs are 128 different people? That is almost impossible. Again, that is certainly not true for Prince William, or for his Grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II.
How can that possibly be true for you, when even the average marriage before 1950 was 4th cousin? It is impossible that you have had no pedigree collapse and have 128 unique individual ancestors at the 5G-GP level.Replies: @Old Palo Altan
Are they? The math checks out using reasonable numbers.
The “math” is not the whole picture.
Until very recently (say until after the Second War) people did not marry outside their own class. This was less true in the USA or the Colonies than in Europe, but still noticeable.
Thus descent from Pocahontas was mostly restricted to Americans of old Virginian stock for some centuries after her own lifetime.
Descent from her contemporary King James I of England was of course even more restricted, first to royalty and then to higher aristocracy, and ultimately to well-off members of the middle class.
Descent from a continental royal of the same period, say the king of France or the Holy Roman Emperor, would have been restricted entirely to other royals until after the First World War at least. Even illegitimate offspring were, when recognised, ennobled and then married off to minor royals or members of the higher aristocracy.
Descents from Charlemagne are admittedly two-a-penny, but it would even in his case be a step too far to say that everyone in Europe today descends from him, merely because the brute numbers tell us so.
Until very recently (say until after the Second War) people did not marry outside their own class. This was less true in the USA or the Colonies than in Europe, but still noticeable.
Thus descent from Pocahontas was mostly restricted to Americans of old Virginian stock for some centuries after her own lifetime.
Descent from her contemporary King James I of England was of course even more restricted, first to royalty and then to higher aristocracy, and ultimately to well-off members of the middle class.
Descent from a continental royal of the same period, say the king of France or the Holy Roman Emperor, would have been restricted entirely to other royals until after the First World War at least. Even illegitimate offspring were, when recognised, ennobled and then married off to minor royals or members of the higher aristocracy.
Descents from Charlemagne are admittedly two-a-penny, but it would even in his case be a step too far to say that everyone in Europe today descends from him, merely because the brute numbers tell us so.Replies: @Highlander, @TWS
I must disagree however much it grates on those with ultra-reactionary sensibilities. The brute numbers i.e. the fecundity of his descendants, the small European population in 800 AD, the high rate of population growth in the High Middle Ages, and the Black Death bottleneck guarantee the probability to be 99% plus some number of decimal places.
We share 50% of genes with a banana, therefore one of your parents is a banana.
Thomm wrote:
I doubt that this is true. It may have been true in pre-industrial Europe, especially in small towns, but it’s not true in the Americas today, where people’s ancestors came from all corners of Europe.
Did the distance over which people get married initially increase due to rail or bicycles?
Thomm wrote:
I doubt that this is true. It may have been true in pre-industrial Europe, especially in small towns, but it’s not true in the Americas today, where people’s ancestors came from all corners of Europe.
Did the distance over which people get married initially increase due to rail or bicycles?
Interesting - and sad - anecdote, but it should be noted that miscarriage probabilities increase throughout a woman's fourth decade, regardless of the mother's relationship to the father.Replies: @TWS
Yes very sad. Weird thing was they had all spent their summers together. You’d think there’d feel some discomfort.
Until very recently (say until after the Second War) people did not marry outside their own class. This was less true in the USA or the Colonies than in Europe, but still noticeable.
Thus descent from Pocahontas was mostly restricted to Americans of old Virginian stock for some centuries after her own lifetime.
Descent from her contemporary King James I of England was of course even more restricted, first to royalty and then to higher aristocracy, and ultimately to well-off members of the middle class.
Descent from a continental royal of the same period, say the king of France or the Holy Roman Emperor, would have been restricted entirely to other royals until after the First World War at least. Even illegitimate offspring were, when recognised, ennobled and then married off to minor royals or members of the higher aristocracy.
Descents from Charlemagne are admittedly two-a-penny, but it would even in his case be a step too far to say that everyone in Europe today descends from him, merely because the brute numbers tell us so.Replies: @Highlander, @TWS
Christopher Lee was related on his mom’s side to Charlemagne. He had a pretty regal voice.
https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/212170668-Average-percent-DNA-shared-between-relativesReplies: @JMcG, @ben tillman
You share almost all of your DNA with your fourth cousins.
my family had our DNA genotyped at 23andme and discovered some 4th cousins. Also realized that most 4th cousins will not actually share any DNA with each other..Since my mother and Grandmother tested it made it easier to identify my 4th cousins, as we share such a small amount of DNA with 4th cousins it is impossible to distinguish a potential 4th, 5th of 6th cousin via DNA testing.
Many of my fourth cousins share no DNA with me but share a small segment with my sister and vice versa. In fact people typically share no DNA with a 4th cousin.
Third cousins usually will share one segment of DNA, equal to less than 1% of your genome.
For ashkenazi and other inbred populations third cousins will share in excess of 3% of their DNA...and all ashkenazi will appear as 5th cousins genetically...Replies: @GW, @ben tillman
You are talking about humans? Who share no DNA? Yet they are all humans?
In the first example (that of 4th cousins), "sharing DNA" is being used as a shorthand for percent blood-relatedness. Fourth cousins are the GGG-grandchildren of the same set of GGG-grandparents, which means that they share a 1/64th blood fraction with one another, or about 1.5%.
Darwinists (I am not one) who gleefully assert that we humans share 99% of our DNA with bonobos mean something else. What they mean by "sharing DNA" is that, of the particular proteins found present in both species, the DNA that constructs those proteins uses the same genetic sequence in 99 cases out of a hundred.
If the definition from the second instance were applied to the first, it would be found that 4th cousins "shared" virtually 100% of their DNA with each other, with the differences between them being both minuscule and irrelevant.
What this all means is really nothing, but it is subjectively very important to the mindset of contemporary Darwinists who assume that identical protein templates imply common descent. While it may be pedantic, it is still often necessary to enumerate some of the ways in which this implication is under-determined.
1. Identical proteins can be assembled from different DNA sequences. This much is uncontroversial, but eo ipso it destabilizes the causal linkage; for it means that even when the identical DNA sequence and the identical protein are found in two distinct species, it is not thereby proven that the same sequence constructs the same protein in each case. It would still have to be empirically affirmed that it actually does so.
2. Identical DNA sequences can assemble different proteins, depending on how they are regulated. This also is uncontroversial, but it means that the organism is something distinct from its DNA. This is empirically established by the fact of genetic clones displaying sometimes rather obvious phenotypic variations. In many cases, the problems of gene expression and protein folding are intractable.
3. Identical DNA sequences can be acquired by means other than common descent. Such means include, but are not limited to, manifold degrees of chimerical appropriation and environmental constraints.
Taken together, these three considerations entail that there is no strict 1:1:1 correspondence between DNA, proteins, and descent, despite the attractiveness and prima facie plausibility of the whole idea. Descent is the subjective element that the Darwinist can only read into the data; it cannot be read out of it. The fact that life actualizes itself thus is consistent with any theory of origins and therefore cannot dispose between them. For the intellect of man, the origin of life and its division into various forms is a given fact of which the "why", the "how", and the "whence" are mysteries we can do nothing more than accept.
Darwinism makes a superficial attempt to obliterate the mystery by imposing upon the brute facts a system of material causality developed along the fitness principle. That it appeared to explain the ineffable was the secret of its popularity. While a skilled ontologist would always have been able to see that Darwinism was a nonstarter, there are not many such people in any era; and as far as hypotheses go, Darwinism, while being shallow and materialistic, is at least endowed with an impressive consistency that the men of an earlier generation could have held up as a triumph of their reason and creativity. But for us today, to cling to such an idea is mere provincialism. It evinces a slackening of the will to discover and to know the essences of things, a lack of that encyclopedic command of facts which the savants of the 18th century had in abundance.
The task before us today, the greatest and necessarily the last task that Western science will ever have, is to do away with this system of superficial causality and put in its place a pure physiognomic of nature, a devastating skepticism that will penetrate all things by taking them exactly as it finds them. It was this that the great Leibniz foresaw from the immense distance of centuries. Rare is he today, though, who can incorporate the fact, ever-present but of necessity suppressed, that the most exacting science will issue, must issue at last, in expressions of ultimate and conclusory agnosticism.
However much the up-to-date rationalist will lament it, so it is.Replies: @ben tillman, @Almost Missouri
But that doesn’t actually work, either, since “percent blood-relatedness” depends on all ancestors and their relatedness to one another.
It’s intended to mean the average common inheritance from a particular ancestor. That’s a lot of words, but if that’s what you mean that’s what you should say.
When people say that we share percentage of our DNA with, say, monkeys they're referring to the actual sequence of As, Ts, Gs and Cs, quite a lot of which doesn't code directly for any proteins but may have other regulatory functions. When you get down to the actual protein-coding sequences there's much less similarity. Also remember that a few percentage points difference in a genome containing billions of base pairs still leaves a lot of room for variation (the old "well blacks and whites are 99.9% similar so we're basically the same" dodge - the genome is more like a computer program than a book).
As always, ignore the creationists and their confused ramblings.Replies: @ben tillman
If it mean that all 128 5G's GPs are 128 different people, then it is entirely possible (in my own case for example). But if it means that none of them are related to one another to, say, the third degree, then I would agree with you that it is very unlikely.Replies: @Thomm
I mean that are they unique individuals. Nothing more.
Are you sure all 128 of your 5G-GPs are 128 different people? That is almost impossible. Again, that is certainly not true for Prince William, or for his Grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II.
How can that possibly be true for you, when even the average marriage before 1950 was 4th cousin? It is impossible that you have had no pedigree collapse and have 128 unique individual ancestors at the 5G-GP level.
But Americans don't, at least not to the same degree. What can I tell you? each one of my 128 5G-GP is not also one of the other 127. That one might share some ancestry with one or two of the others is another matter. I am very far from alone in this, I am quite certain. Indeed it is both common and unremarkable.
Yes, it would be astonishing in a remote valley in the Alps, where nobody ever moved away, but on the proud sun-lit uplands of our great continent, where people constantly moved from one state to the other and where the population was constantly being replenished it is hardly surprising.
It both amazes and puzzles me that this fact should be controversial.Replies: @Thomm
Yes, but the reason I didn’t say that is because that’s not what I meant. I am specifically talking about percentages here, not about averages, and I am talking about ideal family trees in which the members are not related to one another in manners other than those which their unique place in the tree stipulates.
Revised for you:
You are right. Almost everyone who studies this agrees with the points I listed in Comment #55. Even if 99% of reproduction was intra-class, the 1% that was not is sufficient to ensure that everyone with any known European ancestry (and therefore all Hispanics and New World blacks in addition) are descendants of Charlemagne.
Just like almost all Eurasians are descendants of Genghis Khan (only the most remote islanders like Andamanese, Icelandics, etc. might be exceptions).
And yes, all Europeans as well as all Muslims are descendants of Muhammad. This, too, has been heavily tracked and verified.
I'm certain of the Charlemagne and you are undoubtedly right about Genghis Khan. The furthest western penetration of the Mongol invasions generally petered out in the Pannonian Basin due to being demarcated on three sides by the formidable surrounding Carpathian Mountains and the Dinaric Alps. Hardly terrain suited for light cavalry and chariots. While our First Lady and native to the region Melanija Knavs certainly plays up her Mongol features for effect by expert application of makeup her son Baron is not unlike many central Europeans in his features. It is not at all unlikely that there was a certain spreading of Mongol elements of the Slovenian and Polish gene pools to surrounding areas over the last seven or eight hundred years.
Yes, one of the genetic traces of conquerors vs. conquerees is that the genetic “footprint” of the conqueror appears on the male Y-chromosome, while the female mtDNA traces those who were conquered-but-survived.
In the first example (that of 4th cousins), "sharing DNA" is being used as a shorthand for percent blood-relatedness. Fourth cousins are the GGG-grandchildren of the same set of GGG-grandparents, which means that they share a 1/64th blood fraction with one another, or about 1.5%.
Darwinists (I am not one) who gleefully assert that we humans share 99% of our DNA with bonobos mean something else. What they mean by "sharing DNA" is that, of the particular proteins found present in both species, the DNA that constructs those proteins uses the same genetic sequence in 99 cases out of a hundred.
If the definition from the second instance were applied to the first, it would be found that 4th cousins "shared" virtually 100% of their DNA with each other, with the differences between them being both minuscule and irrelevant.
What this all means is really nothing, but it is subjectively very important to the mindset of contemporary Darwinists who assume that identical protein templates imply common descent. While it may be pedantic, it is still often necessary to enumerate some of the ways in which this implication is under-determined.
1. Identical proteins can be assembled from different DNA sequences. This much is uncontroversial, but eo ipso it destabilizes the causal linkage; for it means that even when the identical DNA sequence and the identical protein are found in two distinct species, it is not thereby proven that the same sequence constructs the same protein in each case. It would still have to be empirically affirmed that it actually does so.
2. Identical DNA sequences can assemble different proteins, depending on how they are regulated. This also is uncontroversial, but it means that the organism is something distinct from its DNA. This is empirically established by the fact of genetic clones displaying sometimes rather obvious phenotypic variations. In many cases, the problems of gene expression and protein folding are intractable.
3. Identical DNA sequences can be acquired by means other than common descent. Such means include, but are not limited to, manifold degrees of chimerical appropriation and environmental constraints.
Taken together, these three considerations entail that there is no strict 1:1:1 correspondence between DNA, proteins, and descent, despite the attractiveness and prima facie plausibility of the whole idea. Descent is the subjective element that the Darwinist can only read into the data; it cannot be read out of it. The fact that life actualizes itself thus is consistent with any theory of origins and therefore cannot dispose between them. For the intellect of man, the origin of life and its division into various forms is a given fact of which the "why", the "how", and the "whence" are mysteries we can do nothing more than accept.
Darwinism makes a superficial attempt to obliterate the mystery by imposing upon the brute facts a system of material causality developed along the fitness principle. That it appeared to explain the ineffable was the secret of its popularity. While a skilled ontologist would always have been able to see that Darwinism was a nonstarter, there are not many such people in any era; and as far as hypotheses go, Darwinism, while being shallow and materialistic, is at least endowed with an impressive consistency that the men of an earlier generation could have held up as a triumph of their reason and creativity. But for us today, to cling to such an idea is mere provincialism. It evinces a slackening of the will to discover and to know the essences of things, a lack of that encyclopedic command of facts which the savants of the 18th century had in abundance.
The task before us today, the greatest and necessarily the last task that Western science will ever have, is to do away with this system of superficial causality and put in its place a pure physiognomic of nature, a devastating skepticism that will penetrate all things by taking them exactly as it finds them. It was this that the great Leibniz foresaw from the immense distance of centuries. Rare is he today, though, who can incorporate the fact, ever-present but of necessity suppressed, that the most exacting science will issue, must issue at last, in expressions of ultimate and conclusory agnosticism.
However much the up-to-date rationalist will lament it, so it is.Replies: @ben tillman, @Almost Missouri
Agree with the first part.
You lost me a little in the last big paragraph.
What is “a pure physiognomic of nature”? And how do you know that it “must issue at last, in expressions of ultimate and conclusory agnosticism”?
Are you sure all 128 of your 5G-GPs are 128 different people? That is almost impossible. Again, that is certainly not true for Prince William, or for his Grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II.
How can that possibly be true for you, when even the average marriage before 1950 was 4th cousin? It is impossible that you have had no pedigree collapse and have 128 unique individual ancestors at the 5G-GP level.Replies: @Old Palo Altan
Well, of course it isn’t true for Prince William, and even less for his grandmother: royals marry one another.
But Americans don’t, at least not to the same degree. What can I tell you? each one of my 128 5G-GP is not also one of the other 127. That one might share some ancestry with one or two of the others is another matter. I am very far from alone in this, I am quite certain. Indeed it is both common and unremarkable.
Yes, it would be astonishing in a remote valley in the Alps, where nobody ever moved away, but on the proud sun-lit uplands of our great continent, where people constantly moved from one state to the other and where the population was constantly being replenished it is hardly surprising.
It both amazes and puzzles me that this fact should be controversial.
How do you know? Do you have detailed records that name every single one? If you are going to insist that you do, then at what stage do you experience pedigree collapse? Out of the 256? The 512? Where?Replies: @Old Palo Altan
It is a pity that graveyards going back to the middle ages can’t be dug up and the bodies disinterred to sample for full genome scans. I’d start with everyone buried in Westminster Abbey. It won’t happen nowadays for absurd religious and cultural taboos. While an unknown ancient or medieval gravesite buried under years of peat or topsoil accumulation is fair game, anything with a headstone in a churchyard is more or less off limits.
I’m certain of the Charlemagne and you are undoubtedly right about Genghis Khan. The furthest western penetration of the Mongol invasions generally petered out in the Pannonian Basin due to being demarcated on three sides by the formidable surrounding Carpathian Mountains and the Dinaric Alps. Hardly terrain suited for light cavalry and chariots. While our First Lady and native to the region Melanija Knavs certainly plays up her Mongol features for effect by expert application of makeup her son Baron is not unlike many central Europeans in his features. It is not at all unlikely that there was a certain spreading of Mongol elements of the Slovenian and Polish gene pools to surrounding areas over the last seven or eight hundred years.
I’m sorry. I did not mean to imply that I was talking about you. The pronoun I used was meant to be the generic “you”.
Revised for you:
You lost me a little in the last big paragraph.
What is "a pure physiognomic of nature"? And how do you know that it "must issue at last, in expressions of ultimate and conclusory agnosticism"?Replies: @Old Palo Altan
He means that we are to look at things in an uncomplicated way, and, that accomplished, to recognise that our vaunted agnosticism should be turned upon ourselves rather than God.
A pure physiognomic of nature means the recognition that all the phenomena that appear before our eyes, whatever else they may be, must at any rate be the expression of something living. Therefore the proper way of knowing them is through the direct apperception of their form-connotations, their stylized elements. It means asking the question, “What kind of life, what kind of will, comes to expression in the act of this thing appearing as it does?” It does not mean, for instance, asking, “What are the true and quantifiable taxonomic relationships between the Lepidoptera?” (this question, as we shall eventually see, has no meaning) but, “What is a butterfly?” What manner of creature is this? What does its existence reflect concerning the Divine mind? The physiognomic of nature is the act of feeling our way into consonance with the forms of actually existing things so as to arrive at a knowledge of their essences.
“Ultimate and conclusory agnosticism” (the phrase was carefully chosen) means the recognition that the very concept of an exact scientific description of reality is a phantasm. It means that the types of questions which a physical science must necessarily pose (for example, “What are the valid laws underlying motion?”) are not capable of final treatments, and that every answer arrived at by a physical researcher was in fact implicit in the form of the reasoning. It is an act of true skepticism which demolishes the scientific world-picture built up over a few rationalistic centuries, not by shutting its eyes to that picture but by closing it off, by realizing that the entire form of the ideation is reducible—and at once of necessity reduced—to a single, all-too-human act of the will, a certain desire to see which at last is identical with the thing seen.
And with that, rational science must fall upon its own keen sword. The physiognomic of nature described above is the furthest into things that the mind of man can penetrate. It is “ultimate” because we realize that here is a limit beyond which we cannot go. It is “conclusory agnosticism” because we must conclude that the questions of science are unanswerable in the manner in which science asks them.
Many of the technological results that Western science has wrung from forms of nature will remain in the world, but they will subside into the realm of quotidian smith-craft. The theoria which once undergirded them and transformed them into living symbols of intellectual achievement will have faded away. It is already the case, observed by many throughout the prior century, that the form-world of Western science is in rapid decomposition. No new important theoretical results have emerged in over 100 years; and the results which did then emerge—special relativity, the quantum description of the atom—were ad hoc hypotheses which forswore at the outset the very precision which science, properly so-called, demands. Another 50 or 75 years will suffice to exhaust even the pretense of a contemplative nature-picture, despite the fact that computers, aircraft, electronic devices, microscopes, and telescopes—ancient symbols of technical mastery—will no doubt remain.
The physiognomic of nature will be the last, highest, and necessarily final issue of Western natural philosophy. It will bequeath to the world a grand method of understanding which may not be appreciated for centuries hence, the same way that Aristotle fully came into his inheritance only after being taken up by St. Thomas 1400 years later. And with that, the Western soul lays itself down wearily to rest.
But Americans don't, at least not to the same degree. What can I tell you? each one of my 128 5G-GP is not also one of the other 127. That one might share some ancestry with one or two of the others is another matter. I am very far from alone in this, I am quite certain. Indeed it is both common and unremarkable.
Yes, it would be astonishing in a remote valley in the Alps, where nobody ever moved away, but on the proud sun-lit uplands of our great continent, where people constantly moved from one state to the other and where the population was constantly being replenished it is hardly surprising.
It both amazes and puzzles me that this fact should be controversial.Replies: @Thomm
Why? This very article says that 4th-cousin was the *average* distance of marriage between 1850, which outright precludes 128 unique ancestors at the 5G-GP level. It is impossible that you have avoided pedigree collapse and have 128 unique GGGGG-GPs.
How do you know? Do you have detailed records that name every single one? If you are going to insist that you do, then at what stage do you experience pedigree collapse? Out of the 256? The 512? Where?
Click on that:
In front of you you will have the complete direct ancestry of the grandchildren of Valery Giscard d"Estaing, President of France from 1974-1981. It lists all but eight of the 128 five-times grandparents and - none of them are the same person. Those eight who are not known are obviously not going to prove one day to be any of those who are known, as you will no doubt agree.
So here we have what your rigidly mathematical theory insists is impossible, or so at least you and Highlander want us to believe.
Drop your theory: it is false.Replies: @Thomm, @Highlander
The “act of true skepticism” does not demolish the scientific world-picture it in fact posits that one’s correct world picture is a matter of calculating probabilities. You blather philosophically idealistic a priori nonsense. Read David Hume.
“You share % of your DNA with your relatives” refers to the percentage of DNA that you both inherited from the same ancestor. Two people could (in theory) be 100% genetically identical if they had identical genomes but still not share DNA in that sense if the genomes were not from the same ancestor (if they were created in a lab, let’s say). Also note that the percentage of DNA you share with your relatives is just an average, it could be more or less in any one individual (hence the very small chance that a brother and sister born of the same parents could have no genes in common – would incest between them be a crime?). It’s confusing terminology and really more of a folk shorthand than a scientific term.
When people say that we share percentage of our DNA with, say, monkeys they’re referring to the actual sequence of As, Ts, Gs and Cs, quite a lot of which doesn’t code directly for any proteins but may have other regulatory functions. When you get down to the actual protein-coding sequences there’s much less similarity. Also remember that a few percentage points difference in a genome containing billions of base pairs still leaves a lot of room for variation (the old “well blacks and whites are 99.9% similar so we’re basically the same” dodge – the genome is more like a computer program than a book).
As always, ignore the creationists and their confused ramblings.
How do you know? Do you have detailed records that name every single one? If you are going to insist that you do, then at what stage do you experience pedigree collapse? Out of the 256? The 512? Where?Replies: @Old Palo Altan
Go to s site called “Heirs of Europe”. Use the side bar to the left to find “Giscard d”Estaing”.
Click on that:
In front of you you will have the complete direct ancestry of the grandchildren of Valery Giscard d”Estaing, President of France from 1974-1981. It lists all but eight of the 128 five-times grandparents and – none of them are the same person. Those eight who are not known are obviously not going to prove one day to be any of those who are known, as you will no doubt agree.
So here we have what your rigidly mathematical theory insists is impossible, or so at least you and Highlander want us to believe.
Drop your theory: it is false.
Even with Gicard d'Estaing, it is obvious that pedigree collapse is the reason those 8 are not listed as extra individuals.
Now, answer the question :
If you are so certain that you have 128 unique ancestors at the 5G-GP level, then WHERE do you expect your very first pedigree collapse to begin? At the 6G-GP level, where you don't have 256 unique ancestors? The 7G-GP level, where you don't have 512 unique ancestors?
Or do you actually believe that at 30 generations back (oh, say 800-1000 years back), you happen to have 1,073,741,824 unique ancestors?Replies: @Old Palo Altan
When people say that we share percentage of our DNA with, say, monkeys they're referring to the actual sequence of As, Ts, Gs and Cs, quite a lot of which doesn't code directly for any proteins but may have other regulatory functions. When you get down to the actual protein-coding sequences there's much less similarity. Also remember that a few percentage points difference in a genome containing billions of base pairs still leaves a lot of room for variation (the old "well blacks and whites are 99.9% similar so we're basically the same" dodge - the genome is more like a computer program than a book).
As always, ignore the creationists and their confused ramblings.Replies: @ben tillman
Which is what I said, so we’re on the same page.
That’s my point. It’s confusing because it’s wrong because we all have more than one ancestor.
Click on that:
In front of you you will have the complete direct ancestry of the grandchildren of Valery Giscard d"Estaing, President of France from 1974-1981. It lists all but eight of the 128 five-times grandparents and - none of them are the same person. Those eight who are not known are obviously not going to prove one day to be any of those who are known, as you will no doubt agree.
So here we have what your rigidly mathematical theory insists is impossible, or so at least you and Highlander want us to believe.
Drop your theory: it is false.Replies: @Thomm, @Highlander
You didn’t answer the question. It seems you don’t grasp the concept of pedigree collapse. It is not a ‘theory’, it is a fact, and the original article from Steve Sailer (which you don’t appear to grasp) mentions it as well.
Even with Gicard d’Estaing, it is obvious that pedigree collapse is the reason those 8 are not listed as extra individuals.
Now, answer the question :
If you are so certain that you have 128 unique ancestors at the 5G-GP level, then WHERE do you expect your very first pedigree collapse to begin? At the 6G-GP level, where you don’t have 256 unique ancestors? The 7G-GP level, where you don’t have 512 unique ancestors?
Or do you actually believe that at 30 generations back (oh, say 800-1000 years back), you happen to have 1,073,741,824 unique ancestors?
I deny only your maximalist view (you began by doubting in the second comment on this thread that anyone could have even 64 unique 4G grandparents, a ludicrous position). I have now proved that even at the high social level of the Giscards a unique series of 128 5G grandparents is possible.I call your theory false because it led you to such a ridiculous (and easily disproved) position. I have no doubt that at at 256 or 512 or 1028 or later the Giscards uniqueness will end. And mine too.
I was never doubting the actual theory, only your interpretation of it.
Click on that:
In front of you you will have the complete direct ancestry of the grandchildren of Valery Giscard d"Estaing, President of France from 1974-1981. It lists all but eight of the 128 five-times grandparents and - none of them are the same person. Those eight who are not known are obviously not going to prove one day to be any of those who are known, as you will no doubt agree.
So here we have what your rigidly mathematical theory insists is impossible, or so at least you and Highlander want us to believe.
Drop your theory: it is false.Replies: @Thomm, @Highlander
It is not a theory. You “prove” in no way that there is not second, third, or fourth cousin (even once once removed) genealogy collapse among those 128. You don’t even understand the problem. Ancestry going back to 800 A.D. is by logical necessity a directed acyclic graph not a simplistic binary tree.
https://isogg.org/wiki/Pedigree_collapse
In comment 78 I asked Thomm just how he defined "unique". His answer, and his other comments here, show that he meant simply 64 or 128 or whatever discrete individuals.
So I took him at his word and proved that he was wrong to insist that such ancestries are impossible.
In that same comment 78 I agreed that it would be most unlikely that one or another of those 64 or 128 or whatever discrete individuals would not be related in a lesser or greater degree to one or another of the 63 or 127 or whatever-1 discrete individuals.Thus I had already accepted the wider theory; it was Thomm's unimaginative interpretation of it which I objected to.Replies: @Highlander
It is pretty hard for anyone to have 64 unique 4G-GPs.
It is next to impossible for anyone to have 128 unique 5G-GPs.
In modern times, the rise in average marriage distance from 4th cousin to 7th arguably gets undone by the rise of sperm donors, etc. (one man with 20 offspring who don't know each other)..
Forget cousin marriage. What about people inadvertently marrying their half-sisters or even half-daughters owing to the scourge of practically unregulated anonymous sperm donation?
Thomm,
Some populations are much more inbred than others. I’d be surprised if the majority of Amish have 128 unique 5th gen GGPs, same with people born in Europe in the year 1800. On the other hand, I’m not surprised to hear that many white Americans living today have 128 unique 5th gen GGPs. This is because they moved around a lot and there was continuous immigration from all around Europe.
When does pedigree collapse really “begin to kick in?” For the average European, probably around the 4th gen GGPs (they’d have 62 instead of 64, say), and for white Americans, around the 6th or 7th gen GGPs (250 instead of 256, say).
Example:
gen, [observed], (theoretical if no pedigree collapse)
——————–
5th: [128] (128)
6th: [250] (256)
7th: [476] (512)
8th: [880] (1024)
9th: [1700] 2048
10th: [3200] (4096)
These numbers could be way off, but I’d guess that genealogy databases are getting good enough that you could answer this question pretty decisively with a smart script.
Even with Gicard d'Estaing, it is obvious that pedigree collapse is the reason those 8 are not listed as extra individuals.
Now, answer the question :
If you are so certain that you have 128 unique ancestors at the 5G-GP level, then WHERE do you expect your very first pedigree collapse to begin? At the 6G-GP level, where you don't have 256 unique ancestors? The 7G-GP level, where you don't have 512 unique ancestors?
Or do you actually believe that at 30 generations back (oh, say 800-1000 years back), you happen to have 1,073,741,824 unique ancestors?Replies: @Old Palo Altan
If you read the genealogy with care you will come to understand that the eight unknowns cannot also be any of the known 120.
I deny only your maximalist view (you began by doubting in the second comment on this thread that anyone could have even 64 unique 4G grandparents, a ludicrous position). I have now proved that even at the high social level of the Giscards a unique series of 128 5G grandparents is possible.
I call your theory false because it led you to such a ridiculous (and easily disproved) position.
I have no doubt that at at 256 or 512 or 1028 or later the Giscards uniqueness will end. And mine too.
I was never doubting the actual theory, only your interpretation of it.
Ah, now you are changing the goal posts.
In comment 78 I asked Thomm just how he defined “unique”. His answer, and his other comments here, show that he meant simply 64 or 128 or whatever discrete individuals.
So I took him at his word and proved that he was wrong to insist that such ancestries are impossible.
In that same comment 78 I agreed that it would be most unlikely that one or another of those 64 or 128 or whatever discrete individuals would not be related in a lesser or greater degree to one or another of the 63 or 127 or whatever-1 discrete individuals.
Thus I had already accepted the wider theory; it was Thomm’s unimaginative interpretation of it which I objected to.
I do agree that your unique 128 gggg-grandparents may very well be related to one another and not just from previous generations beyond the 128. You don't have 128 theoretically distinct ancestors from 4-gggg back but 254 if you total each individual from every generation, and these also may very well be related to one another. e,g, If the sister or brother of one of your great grandparents married someone outside of your tree and then her daughter or granddaughter appeared as one of your 254 direct ancestors you would be inheriting genes from the same pair of great grandparents from two different lines of descent. This too is pedigree collapse. In order to absolutely know one would need the complete pedigrees of each of the 254 ancestors both up to your 4-gggg level and down to the current generation.
This re-introduction of genes from 2nd or once removed cousins etc. is rife in isolated villages, European aristocracies, and Boston, Philadelphia, and Tidewater gentry along with Scots-Irish Appalachian families in the United States too.
Any stockman, eugenicist, or snobbish old auntie would find it a beneficial thing for second and third cousin matings to facilitate maintaining breeding to a beneficial type while still being outbred enough to eliminate the build-up of deleterious traits.
Agreed. Since the main article itself says that for the longest time, the average distance between spouses was 4th cousin (meaning 3rd cousin was just as frequent as 5th cousin), I stand by my statement that :
It is pretty hard for anyone to have 64 unique 4G-GPs.
It is next to impossible for anyone to have 128 unique 5G-GPs.
In modern times, the rise in average marriage distance from 4th cousin to 7th arguably gets undone by the rise of sperm donors, etc. (one man with 20 offspring who don’t know each other)..
In comment 78 I asked Thomm just how he defined "unique". His answer, and his other comments here, show that he meant simply 64 or 128 or whatever discrete individuals.
So I took him at his word and proved that he was wrong to insist that such ancestries are impossible.
In that same comment 78 I agreed that it would be most unlikely that one or another of those 64 or 128 or whatever discrete individuals would not be related in a lesser or greater degree to one or another of the 63 or 127 or whatever-1 discrete individuals.Thus I had already accepted the wider theory; it was Thomm's unimaginative interpretation of it which I objected to.Replies: @Highlander
First of all I am not changing the goal posts. What I actually took exception to was your statement that every European is not necessarily descended from Charlemagne. I provided a link to abundant research on pedigree collapse that explains why we all almost certainly are.
I do agree that your unique 128 gggg-grandparents may very well be related to one another and not just from previous generations beyond the 128. You don’t have 128 theoretically distinct ancestors from 4-gggg back but 254 if you total each individual from every generation, and these also may very well be related to one another. e,g, If the sister or brother of one of your great grandparents married someone outside of your tree and then her daughter or granddaughter appeared as one of your 254 direct ancestors you would be inheriting genes from the same pair of great grandparents from two different lines of descent. This too is pedigree collapse. In order to absolutely know one would need the complete pedigrees of each of the 254 ancestors both up to your 4-gggg level and down to the current generation.
This re-introduction of genes from 2nd or once removed cousins etc. is rife in isolated villages, European aristocracies, and Boston, Philadelphia, and Tidewater gentry along with Scots-Irish Appalachian families in the United States too.
Any stockman, eugenicist, or snobbish old auntie would find it a beneficial thing for second and third cousin matings to facilitate maintaining breeding to a beneficial type while still being outbred enough to eliminate the build-up of deleterious traits.
Works for me.
Is this distinct from Goethean science?