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Tracing Your Family Tree Back 45,000 Years
from the fun-for-the-whole-family dept
Plenty of genealogists have been able to trace their family trees back a few centuries, but at some point in history that trail runs dry. However, one researcher is working on ways to track historical information about your ancestors via your DNA, and is running a big project to gather a ton of information. He's actually worried that this project needs to be completed relatively soon. Now that the world has become a great big mixing pot, many of the historical DNA information is getting blended together, making it more difficult to trace the histories of any particular individual. Of course, it's only fair, as the historical record does seem to show we all pretty much started from the same point anyway.
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Flawed Assumptions
Truth is, mitochondrial DNA can occasionally be transmitted from the father as well, when Mr. Sperm has a few stray mitochondria that squirt into Ms. Ovum.
Since Ms. Ovum receives chromosomes piecemeal, each chromosome has a 50% chance of being transmitted. In theory, it is possible to be completely unrelated to your biological sibling, if your sibling received chromosomes 1,2,3... while you received 1',2',3'... (The probability of its occurrence, ignoring recombination, is about 2^-46.)
For the same reason, it is theoretically possible for you to be completely unrelated genetically to one of your grandparents, even if they are your biological grandparent.
Older mothers are more likely to give birth to twins than younger mothers.
Europeans, Asians, and Native Amreicans are all descended from the same Central Asian ancestors. Paradoxically, as more race mixing occurs, the offspring look more like their ancestors.
There are parts of the world where first-cousin marriages are 50-90% of all marriages. Saudi Arabia is said to suffer serious problems from inbreeding, where every family is said to hide a tard or two. The majority of the population, including Osama, has diabetes. Women in that culture stay home all day, or go on outings to the mall where they eat buckets of Haagen Dazs ice cream. Fitness is a funny Western infidel concept to them.
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Re: Flawed Assumptions
Oh and, women have two X chromosomes, and one of them is inactivated. Each cell will choose a different chromosome to inactivate. If one of the chromosomes has a mutation for a skin color gene, then it is possible for women to have striped skin, another example.
It's the same reason why all calico cats are females.
If you go to grad school for genetics, you'll get to learn all the politically incorrect facts they didn't teach you in high school sex ed.
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Re: Flawed Assumptions
Did you say tard? You fucking bigot!
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Re: Flawed Assumptions
"In theory, it is possible to be completely unrelated to your biological sibling"
Is that what you told your sister?
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Re: Flawed Assumptions
Well, imagine learning all these provocative facts in school all day, and not being able to say what's on your mind. Better to say them here than in front of hospital patients hey?
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tracing one's ancestry back to before Adam
Pooh-bah, a character in Gilbert & Sullivan's light opera The Mikado, traced his ancestry back to "a protoplasmic, primordial, atomic globule".
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Re: tracing one's ancestry back to before Adam
Indeed, a huge portion of our genome is made of viral garbage DNA. We are walking ecosystems home to trillions of bacteria and viruses, some of which get mixed into our genome.
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Re: tracing one's ancestry back to before Adam
Indeed, a huge portion of our genome is made of viral garbage DNA.
From what I can see, some of us have more garbage than others...let us know if by posting it reduces your portion
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hi
want is mine
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