We are Family

Stuff I learned at lunch:

If your two parents hadn’t bonded just when they did – possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond – you wouldn’t be here. And if their parents hadn’t bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn’t be here either. And if their parents hadn’t done likewise, and their parents before them, and so on, obviously and indefinitely, you wouldn’t be here.

Push backward through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up. Go back just eight generations to about the time that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born, and already there are over 250 people on whose timely couplings our existence depends. Continue further, to the time of Shakespeare and the Mayflower pilgrims, and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors earnestly exchanging genetic material in a way that would, eventually and miraculously, result in you.

At twenty generations ago, the number of people procreating on your behalf has risen to 1,048,576. Five generations before that, and there are no fewer than 33,554,432 men and women on whose devoted couplings your existence depends. By thirty generations ago, your total number of forebears – remember, these aren’t cousins and aunts and other incidental relatives, but only parents and parents of parents in a line leading ineluctably to you – is over one billion (1,073,741,824, to be precise). If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose co-operative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately one million trillion, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.

Clearly, something has gone wrong with our maths here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that your line is not pure. You couldn’t be here without a little incest – actually quite a lot of incest – albeit at a genetically discreet remove. With some many millions of ancestors in your background, there will have been many occasions when a relative from your mother’s side of the family procreated with some distant cousin from your father’s side of the ledger. In fact, if you are in a partnership now with someone from your own race and country, the chances are excellent that you are at some level related. Indeed, if you look around you on a bus or in a park or cafe’ of any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from Shakespeare or William the Conqueror, you should answer at once: “Me, too!”. In the most literal and fundamental sense, WE ARE ALL FAMILY.