Quote of the Day: the world is young

“As you move further back in genealogical time, an even bigger paradox looms into view. We think of genealogy as a simple forking tree, our two parents the product of four grandparents, who are descended from eight great-grandparents, and so on. But such a tree eventually explodes into impossibility. By the time you get back to the time of, say, Charlemagne, you have to draw over a trillion forks. In other words, your ancestors from that generation alone far outnumber all the humans who ever lived. The only way out of that paradox is to join some of those forks back together.

...in 1999 a Yale mathematician named Joseph Chang created the first statistical model of it. He found that it has an astonishing property. If you go back far enough in the history of a human population, you reach a point in time when all the individuals who have any descendants among living people are ancestors of all living people.

Ralph and Coop identified 1.9 million chunks shared by at least two of the 2,257 people.
..
Everyone alive a thousand years ago who has any descendants today is an ancestor of every living person of European descent.

Everyone who was alive five thousand years ago who has any living descendants is an ancestor of everyone alive today. ”

-- Carl Zimmer. “She Has Her Mother's Laugh.”

Urban vs Rural

The Republican party doesn't have much to offer to urban (and suburban0 voters.



https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-beto-orourke-shifted-the-map-in-texas/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/nyregion/new-york-republican-party-election.html

The limit on SALT deductions in the recent tax reform bill just added insult to injury.

Race as optical illusion

“In 1972, Lewontin published these results in a profoundly influential paper entitled “The Apportionment of Human Diversity.” He concluded that racial classifications had become entrenched in Western society thanks to optical illusions. People defined races based on features “to which human perceptions are most finely tuned (nose, lip and eye shapes, skin color, hair form and quantity).” But these features were influenced by only a small number of genes. It was wrong to assume that all the other genes people carried followed the same patterns.”

-- Carl Zimmer. “She Has Her Mother's Laugh.”

If we can identify relevant groups of salient features then we can create new social groups.

TIL: German family names for Eastern European Jews

“Before the late 1700s, many eastern European Jews did not use family names. The Austro-Hungarian Empire—of which Galicia was then a part—ordered that all Jews take a name so that they could be more readily taxed. Since Yiddish was banished to private life, the Jews chose names that Austrian officials would approve.”

--- Carl Zimmer. “She Has Her Mother's Laugh.”