…and proceed to argue about population isolates, like the Tasmanians, over at Brad DeLong’s place.
Seriously, I’ll repeat what I said earlier — it would be so, so excellent if we were all descended from Confucius, and it appears likely that we are. No, it’s not like pseudo-scientific racism needed any more nails in the coffin, but this one gets points for elegance.
We are all Chinese, among many, many others. Was Abraham really the Father of Nations? Why yes — he was the father of all nations. Was Helen of Troy the face that launched a thousand ships? Quite possibly! And provided she wasn’t purely a myth, she maybe launched thousands of airplanes, too.
But what about Genghis Khan? We can’t all take pride in the sages and the heroes while leaving out the brutes, can we? Judging by the Y chromosome alone, Genghis Khan may have as many as 16 million descendants today — and Y chromosomal analysis reveals only those males who had an unbroken line of all-male ancestors all the way back to him. Consider females along the way, and the number explodes. (The math is left as an exercise to readers. See DeLong if you’re stuck. It’s eye-popping.)
Now, I’m almost certainly one of these descendants, and possibly through the male line, too. The Mongols came through Poland in 1241, and I can show you my great-great-grandfather’s death certificate, which describes him as having, as the nineteenth century was wont to term it, “Asiatic features.”
He did. So does my dad. So do I, kinda (some see it; some don’t). If I’m related to Confucius, it’s likely through the Genghis Khan line, which gives me a bit of pause. But only a bit.
What I find really interesting about the entire line of thought is that blood lines are an illusion. This cuts a lot deeper than just pseudo-scientific racism. Our intuition about our progeny is that we are preserving or re-creating our selves, and that we are passing our essence on to another generation. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.
Call it secular immortality. A live myth among the spiritually dead. But what we’re really doing is just tossing our briefly united genes back into the pool, where they will dissipate like a drop in the ocean — fine champagne or perhaps venom — never to be reunited again. And this is to say nothing of our experiences, which not even genetic engineering can reunite.
One would think that the religions of the world, far from being threatened by such an insight, would draw strength from it:
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter….
Or just:
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
— Shakespeare, Henry IV, part I
This is very similar to something that I often think.
I am some level of cousin to not only every human on the planet, but also every living thing. Including plants and microbes. It is really awe inspiring and neat until I realize A) I eat my own cousins and B) everyone I have … was a cousin.Report
@ThatPirateGuy, hopefully you … much closer cousins than the ones you eat.Report
@Boegiboe,
Yes, but not too close 😉Report
Well humans are all related to each other by logic, to the rest of the solar system chemically and to the rest of the galaxy atomically.
Shorter more poetic version: we are stardust.Report
This inference here doesn’t seem correct at all. You may have a small number of blood lines back to confucious, but you doubtless have a much larger number of blood lines that go back to your polish ancestors. In the total space of possible bloodlines, you ancestry is probably dominated by poles. So, you much more related to your fellow poles than to Confucious. Blood lines matter. They also explain why different human populations differ genetically, most famously in the case of lactose tolerance, different genes for which I understand arose in many different populations (though to this day not all).Report
@Austin Bramwell, From the paper that inspired all this: “The model also can be used to calculate the percentage ancestry that current individuals receive from different parts of the world. In generations sufficiently far removed from the present, some ancestors appear much more often than do others on any current individual’s family tree, and therefore be expected to contribute proportionately more to his or her genetic inheritance. For example, a present-day Norwegian generally owes the majoriy of his or her ancestry to peopel living in europe at the IA [identical ancestors] point, and a very small portion to people living throughout the rest of the world. Furthermore, because DNA is inherited in relatively large segments from ancestors, an individual will receive little or not actual genetic inheritance from the vast majority of the ancestors living at the IA point.”
So, it looks as if the scientific literature in question says the very opposite of the lesson that Jason wishes to draw. Bloodlines matter – a lot. Jason has received “little or no actual genetic inheritance” from Confucious, but has received lots and lots of genetic inheritance from his Europaean ancestors. Not only has the final nail in the coffin not been driven, but it looks like the corpse is alive and kicking.Report
@Austin Bramwell,
But those Poles, they too were mutts. (And so was Confucius, for that matter.) We’ve just lost the genetic imprints of their ancestors, from the same processes that you mention.
And in any event, the possibility that you will successfully isolate your own genes to pass them on similarly is unlikely to come to fruition.Report
@Jason Kuznicki, Fine, but that we’re all interrelated doesn’t mean that “bloodlines are an illusion.” On the contrary, as the author of the paper proving how we all may be descended from Confucius says, we have dramatically different degrees of relatedness.
I’m not sure what point you are making about the possibilities of passing on genes. If the point is that we’ll all be equally successful in the long run in passing on our genes, that’s not true. It’s basic neo-darwinism that some genes will be wildly more successful at reproducing than others. For example, the first Europaean who had the gene for lactose tolerance had stunning success in passing it on to his many, many descendants. That man or woman utterly dominates his contemporaries both in number of descendants alive today (keep in mind that most of his/her contemporaries have no descendants alive today at all, even if it is true that the set of all common human ancestors existed fairly recently) and the frequency with which his genes are found today.Report
@Austin Bramwell,
I’m not sure what point you are making about the possibilities of passing on genes.
I mean only that you may or may not pass on your genes, but that your genes are not your Self.Report
A few months ago, I was very impressed with myself after discovering an unbroken line from myself back to Charlemagne, and beyond… until I discovered that virtually everyone with European ancestry (and quite a few without obvious European ancestry) can trace their ancestry to Charlemagne. Darn.Report
If you think about who is related to whom in relativistic rather than absolutist terms, you’ll come to more intellectually sophisticated conclusions.Report
@Steve Sailer,
Sailer apparently has built a sophisticated search engine that allows him to inject himself into every even vaguely race-related discussion on the web. It’s pretty impressive, kind of like building a replica of the Taj Mahal out of Pez dispensers.Report
@Mike Schilling, so long as Lonewacko manages to refrain from doing a hit and run comment (no pun intended), I think we’re good.Report