Tag: genealogy

Clerical errors

after recent experiences with both the judicial system (as a juror) and as a patient of the medical system, the amount of clerical errors in both is astonishing. both systems drown in paperwork and both refuse to adapt any technology not from the 19th century to deal with it. total amateur hour, with criminal consequences.
2015-07-09:

After a hospital error, 2 pairs of Colombian identical twins were raised as 2 pairs of fraternal twins. This is the story of how they found one another

Consanguinity

Royal inbreeding

From 1516 to 1700, it has been estimated that over 80% of marriages within the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty were consanguineous.

2013-04-26: Cousin Marriage and Democracy. I had no idea this was so common in some parts of the world.

Approximately 0.2% of all marriages are consanguineous in the United States but in India 26.6% marriages are consanguineous, in Saudi Arabia the figure is 38.4% and in Niger, Pakistan and Sudan a majority of marriages are consanguineous. A recent paper finds that consanguinity is strongly negatively correlated with democracy.

2016-03-07: Middle east Cousin marriage. This explains a lot of problems.

Once common practice in Western societies, estimates suggest the Middle East, along with Africa, continue to have the highest levels in the world. In Egypt, around 40% of the population marry a cousin; the last survey in Jordan, admittedly way back in 1992, found that 32% were married to a first cousin; a further 17.3% were married to more distant relatives. Rates are thought to be even higher in tribal countries such as Iraq and the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Kuwait.

2018-03-03: US Cousin Marriage

Taken together, the data show a 50-year lag between the advent of increased familial dispersion and the decline of genetic relatedness between couples. During this time, individuals continued to marry relatives despite the increased distance. From these results, we hypothesize that changes in 19th-century transportation were not the primary cause for decreased consanguinity. Rather, our results suggest that shifting cultural factors played a more important role in the recent reduction of genetic relatedness of couples in Western societies.

2022-12-06: The MFP may have been a big part of why Europe developed differently

the Church’s “Marriage and Family Plan” (MFP), which included features like monogamy in addition to an obsession with preventing broadly-defined incest, had important downstream consequences in practically every aspect of life. Young men would be more likely to find marriage partners since a few high-status leaders could not claim a disproportionate share of women, creating incentives for individuals to be more hard-working and less violent. The power of elders was further reduced by an inability to arrange marriages in ways that would keep wealth and resources within the same family, unlike in Muslim societies where the son of one brother would often be wedded to the daughter of another. When incest taboos extended to 6th cousins, an individual may have had 10k relatives that were off limits in the marriage market. This wouldn’t be a big deal in a modern city, but when most people lived in small villages it would have created major difficulties for anyone trying to find a spouse. This led to a population that was more mobile, less embedded in kinship networks, and ultimately more individualistic.

What is sure to be one of the most surprising findings discussed in the book relates to how rare the individual components of the MFP have been throughout history. According to one database looking at 1200 societies before industrialization, only 5% had newlywed couples start their own households, 8% organized domestic life around nuclear families, 15% had only monogamous marriages, 25% had little or no cousin marriage, and 28% had bilateral descent, meaning that lineages are traced through both the mother and father. Christian Europe under the MFP had all five, which wasn’t true for over 99% of other societies. Today, after the rest of the world has been heavily influenced by Western culture, given its success, it’s easy to lose sight of how unique its mating and familial practices have been in the larger historical context.

People prone to individualism would go on to achieve high rates of urbanization and form guilds, universities, marketplaces, and other voluntary institutions that were based on principles of mutual self-interest and competed with one another. Ultimately, Western Europe would conquer the world on the back of the strengths of these institutions, with democracy and capitalism being arguably the most important among them.

World Tree

MyHeritage eventually hopes to have 3B profiles, including people who’ve passed away. And at that point the family relationship between any 2 people in the world is just a mouse click away.

2012-05-26: I suspect we’ll be able to construct a family tree of all humans who ever lived in the next 50 years. Once you combine billions of complete DNA with data mining, you can predict how long ago any given mutation occurred. Genetics dictates which mutations dominated in what ways. Extract enough DNA from human remains to interpolate. the genographic project is a small step in that direction

2022-03-10:

The study integrated data on modern and ancient human genomes from eight different databases and included a total of 3609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations. The ancient genomes included samples found across the world with ages ranging from 1 ka to 100 ka. The algorithms predicted where common ancestors must be present in the evolutionary trees to explain the patterns of genetic variation. The resulting network contained 27m ancestors.

After adding location data on these sample genomes, the authors used the network to estimate where the predicted common ancestors had lived. The results successfully recaptured key events in human evolutionary history, including the migration out of Africa.

DNA Heritage

I submitted my DNA anonymously to IBM for a research project, and from the mutations in my Y-chromosome alone, they identified me as haplotype N LLY22G, which pegs the Uralic language of my family and the locale of northern Scandinavia / Eastern Europe. With only my DNA, they identified my family origin on the map above to within a few km, and traced it back to the veritable “Adam” in Africa, from whom we are all descendants.

I wonder how granular these will get eventually. The beginning of the tree is well-known and comparatively easy. Still, welcome to total history beta 1.
2022-03-04:

8 ka BP, 17 women reproduced for every 1 man. An analysis of modern DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture. A member of the research team hypothesizes that only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and power, leaving nothing for others. These men could then pass their wealth on to their sons, perpetuating this pattern of elitist reproductive success. Then the numbers of men reproducing, compared to women, rose again. “Maybe more and more people started being successful.”. In more recent history, as a global average, 5 women reproduced for every 1 man.

Scientific Genealogy

As an aside, there seems to be lots of academic genealogy projects. Of particular note is the neuroscience family tree. That computer scientists through mathematicians can lead their ancestry back to Leibniz isn’t that strange. But many neuroscientists also tie into the above network. Eric Kandel has Otto Mencke in his background, and Herman von Helmholtz has neuroscience and psychology descendants beside his physics and philosophy descendants.

It would be fun to actually merge all these academic graphs to see the big picture, but I will likely need a better layout program to handle it. The philosophers are <8000 and yEd handles them well, but the philosopher graph is just 8% of the mathematician graph.

see also Genealogy of Influence a visualization of the connections between the most influential writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians of Western culture