19 Comments

Í'm pretty sure you are wrong about an individual having equal numbers of male/female ancestors, because you have not taken into account that the ancestor tree does not double every generation you go back. In fact, at certain points in history it will almost certainly get narrower. This represents multiple instances of one man or woman being an ancestor to many different ancestors of the individual concerned. Given your assumptions about populations - which are probably correct in general - I would expect if you go back say 100 generations, you will find fewer men who are ancestors of the "fuller" (nearer the expected power of 2) number of intermediate ancestors than women of that same generation.

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What about the case where the the same father is both my father and my mother's father. This case would suggest that it is possible for an individual to have more female ancestors than male ancestors.

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Jun 23, 2022·edited Jun 23, 2022

For those that wonder about the word "grok". It is a Martian word meaning deep and complete understanding used by the first human baby raised on Mars by Martians, Valentine Michael Smith, who is the central character in Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 science fiction novel, "Stranger in a Strange Land." (With Google's obsession with political correctness and focus on wokeness resulting in its increasing inability to perform its core function, to find a specific answers to a specific question, it has made it impossible for find out how to underline text in Substack comments, I therefore had to resort to quoting the title to this book.)

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I pondered for, oh, 5 seconds, on this topic when I heard someone claim that Alexander the Great is the most prolific ancestor on the planet. I don't remember exactly how that was stated, but the implication was he had himself quite a few females, and implied is that it isn't the worst obstacle in the world to be the son, grandson, great grand son of AtG. One may guess that its always been good to have a government job.

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Jun 22, 2022·edited Jun 22, 2022

Ken’s comment below is close to the scenario you get with fertility doctors unethically using their own sperm to inseminate unsuspecting multiple women. Or just generally what can happen with pregnancy-by-male-donation with certain men as repeat donors.

Of course, as all roads lead to Covid these days, this practice is making Covid headlines because of an Israeli study on the “vaxx” impact on those little donated swimmers. To be expected, the published research attempted to obscure the actual findings lodged in the tables. And so one must root around in SubStacks to get an accurate analysis of the bad state of affairs.

Still, as Heather maintains, individuals have one genetic father and mother in the end. This is true as well for couples who use donated eggs — there’s a genetic donation and a biological mom that (hopefully) carries the baby to term.

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It sounds as though Fathers should be more valued in our culture than they currently are.

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Heather: thanks for throwing a bone to the nerds... :)

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The problem with this logic is that if one man has multiple children with multiple women, and those children or their progeny have children together, the offspring will have more female ancestors than male ancestors. That man will appear multiple times in the family tree next to multiple women.

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