Ancestors and population paradox: exponential growth

re: Ancestors and population paradox: exponential growth

Todd Ostermeier — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 05:37:00 GMT

Too many factors to easily compute this way. For example, what if one woman had a child each with two different men? Those children would share an ancestor, and would make it three people in the previous generation rather than four. Think about polygamy, harems, etc, where one man may have children on many different women. If the group is large enough, that would equal little more than one person in the previous generation (the mother) for each child, since the father would factor out of the equation (see the large portion of Asian people with DNA that can be traced back to Ghengis Khan -- he was prolific enough to essentially wipe himself out of the equation).

re: Ancestors and population paradox: exponential growth

Rob — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 11:24:00 GMT

30 generations back there were an unknown number of family members because the ones you calculated were still not born yet. The number you calculated must be the number of members at this moment of time if no one died during the 30 generations. I like to meet your 750 year old grandfather! If someone is married 6 times or they have 10 childeren doesn't influence calculations. The real factors are diseases like the "Black disease" killing 1/2 of earth population at ones.

re: Ancestors and population paradox: exponential growth

WildFire — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 11:37:00 GMT

Some of us are from outer space.
Really.

re: Ancestors and population paradox: exponential growth

RyanNerd — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 23:23:00 GMT

This is an example of how statistics can be stacked to arrive at an incorrect conclusion. For instance, using statisical calculations I can prove that ice cream causes rape. As the number of rapes in a city goes up so does the number of ice cream sales the charts are almost identical for frequency and time. Why is this??? Because most rapes occur in the summer and ice cream sales increase in the summer as well :-)

Frankly, I'm just glad that the only silly comment so far is about space aliens and not something serious like the flood during Noah's time that would have knocked the population down to 8 souls to start all over again :-)

re: Ancestors and population paradox: exponential growth

Sean — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 13:23:00 GMT

You are assuming that every male and female in your 30 generation family tree appear only once.
Assume that we all descend from Adam and Eve. They would appear at the end of every line you trace back. The 2^30 ancestors = 1,073,741,824 would be 25% Adam and 25% Eve and the rest would be their descendants.
The real situation is that we all have ancestors that appear in both the male and female sides of our family trees, (hopefully) many generations back.
The number of separate individuals will be far less than 1,073,741,824.
In a thoroughbred horse pedigree of 1,022 ancestors (not 1,024) there will be about 400 different individuals. Some may appear in a pedigree 10+ times. Inbreeding = close duplications; linebreeding = 5th, 6th generation duplications and further back.

re: Ancestors and population paradox: exponential growth

drebin — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 23:39:00 GMT

Your also missing another key element - ALL of those people weren't alive all at one time.

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re: Ancestors and population paradox: exponential growth

Tanveer Badar — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:46:46 GMT

Your reasoning is seriously flawed. You seem to be under the 'delusion' that all those people were distinct, ruling out the trivial cases like cousin marriages.

re: Ancestors and population paradox: exponential growth

blake — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 19:38:55 GMT

Hello

I am struggling with this notion of not enough ancestors for the decendants. I undersatnd cosuins marrying cousins but in the end are we all traced back to a few common ancestors? So in the end we all are related? What did that person meanthat some of us come form space. Does DNA testing show how many common ancestors there are in the world?

blaketaylore@yahoo.com

blaketayore.com

re: Ancestors and population paradox: exponential growth

cruicksj@yahoo.com — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 05:55:27 GMT

I think the original post was totally valid mathematically, and raises two very significant questions - how much intermarriage between "cousins" has been taking place during the evolution of the human race, and to what extent have population control, and mass deaths due to wars, plague etc. managed to contain the planet's population at its present level?

Obviously, in early tribal societies, the total available living population spanning, say, three generations, would have to be drawn on to maintain the tribe, and inbreeding would have been inevitable. Equally obviously, therefore, the mathematics cannot reflect the reality.

Does anyone know of a site that contains some real insight into the "paradox"? I would be interested to know.

re: Ancestors and population paradox: exponential growth

cruicksj@yahoo.com — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:37:32 GMT

Further to my previous post, I did find an interesting site at "http://www.bpears.org.uk/Misc/AncestorParadox

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