Cousin of a cousin of a cousin...

[floriferous]

Okay so it's no surprise that Obama is related to Bush. We all saw that coming. But this article shows some unlikely genetic relations. How deep does this thing go?


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7313789.stm

[jennf]

It goes very deep, it all came out a while ago, here are some other links for you :);)

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HLaR6BgpJ7E

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_ldZS9PL9KE&feature=related

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=jyN1O-GwALI&feature=related

and there's plenty more:rolleyes:,

[magicmerlin]

How deep does this thing go?

All the way back to Babylon.......

As a mixed-race radio presenter said today, 'Barak is not black', he is 'mixed race'. In his case, he is half pure bloodline - which probably makes him more 'white' than most 'white people'!

People are so incredibly stupid though. Mainstream news channels have reported that he is related to Bush, and yet they still think 'some random black guy' is about to become President.

[charles d ward]

Inbred wankers!

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

[jennf]

All the way back to Babylon.......

As a mixed-race radio presenter said today, 'Barak is not black', he is 'mixed race'. In his case, he is half pure bloodline - which probably makes him more 'white' than most 'white people'!

People are so incredibly stupid though. Mainstream news channels have reported that he is related to Bush, and yet they still think 'some random black guy' is about to become President.

My thoughts too, *according to reports the biggest turnout*, but they're just saying that as it's main stream owned by TPTB lol!, and try to make those either half awake or not at all revert to vote, to follow the clan!

When will people realise they are voting for the same side of the coin (heads) it makes no difference :rolleyes:

[anonymous]

SPOILER: everyone is related to everyone else much more closely that most people realise.



You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and
so on. With every generation, the number of ancestors doubles. Go back
g generations and the number of ancestors is 2 multiplied by itself
g times: 2 to the power g. Except that, without leaving our armchair, we
can quickly see that it cannot be so. To convince ourselves of this, we
have only to go back a little way — say, to the time of Jesus, almost
exactly two thousand years ago. If we assume, conservatively, four
generations per century — that is, that people breed on average at the
age of twenty-five — two thousand years amounts to a mere eighty
generations. The real figure is probably more than this (until recent
times, many women bred extremely young), but this is only an armchair
calculation, and the point is made regardless of such details. Two
multiplied by itself 80 times is a formidable number, a 1 followed by 24
noughts, a trillion American trillions. You had a million million million
million ancestors who were contemporaries of Jesus, and so did I! But
the total population of the world at that time was a fraction of a
negligible fraction of the number of ancestors we have just calculated.
Obviously we have gone wrong somewhere, but where? We did the
calculation right. The only thing we got wrong was our assumption about
doubling up in every generation. In effect, we forgot that cousins marry.
I assumed that we each have eight great-grandparents. But any child of a
first-cousin marriage has only six great-grandparents, because the
cousins' shared grandparents are in two separate ways great-grandparents
to the children. “So what?” you may ask. People occasionally marry
their cousins (CharL.s Darwin's wife, Emma Wedgwood, was his first
cousin), but surely it doesn't happen often enough to make a difference?


Yes it does, because “cousin” for our purposes includes second cousins,
fifth cousins, sixteenth cousins and so forth. When you count {35}
cousins as distant as that, every marriage is a marriage between cousins.
You sometimes hear people boasting of being a distant cousin of the
Queen, but it is rather pompous of them, because we are all distant
cousins of the Queen, and of everybody else, in more ways than can ever
be traced. The only thing special about royalty and aristocrats is that they
can do the tracing explicitly. As the fourteenth Earl of Home said when
taunted about his title by his political opponent, “I suppose Mr. Wilson,
when you come to think of it, is the fourteenth Mr. Wilson.”
The upshot of all this is that we are much closer cousins of one another
than we normally realize, and we have many fewer ancestors than simple
calculations suggest.

[armchair philosopher]

SPOILER: everyone is related to everyone else much more closely that most people realise.

I must say, I did wonder about this myself. If there's six degrees of connection between everyone on the planet, it can't be much different for ancestors, surely?

I still think it's quite a coincidence that a large number of public figures, especially world leaders, are related quite as closely as they are though. I'm open on this one.