Too Few Men Existed for Me to Exist?

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Re: Too Few Men Existed for Me to Exist?

Postby MagicManICT » Tue Apr 09, 2019 9:13 pm

There's an interesting solution to this problem in chaos theory, but it's been too many years since I read up on it, and I was barely able to understand it then.

stya wrote:I can really see it happen quickly in small villages and reduce dramatically your numbers... Towns/villages used to be very small in comparison to what we have these days.

This is the key to solving the problem. With airline travel, people have really spread out as families go to other places for jobs. It's why Swedes look different than the Swiss, why almost all of Ireland is red-headed. Even with larger cities such as London, Rome, Paris, Berlin, you only go back so many generations before you family tree quits forking in a binary manner. You get into rural communities where there are just a few hundred people at best, and it probably didn't get past 3 before it became entangled. (let's not even mention the royalty of Europe... there's a reason they called each other "cousin" as a casual greeting, and it wasn't because they were speaking to each other as peers.)

I had an aunt that did a genealogy of the family back before the Internet and sites like ancestry.com. I was really surprised at some of what I saw. I can tell you that, mathematically, it's almost guaranteed that, somewhere in the past, your family is inbred to some degree. I don't care who you are. If you're family claims any sort of nobility or royalty in the past, it is a guarantee.
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Re: Too Few Men Existed for Me to Exist?

Postby pppp » Tue Apr 09, 2019 10:14 pm

Do you know your cousins ? Most likely yes.
Do you know cousins of your parents and their children ? Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you met them on some wedding or funeral, and forgot about their existence next minute.
Do you know cousins of your grandparents and their children and grandchildren ? Most likely no, or just a few.
... all fades in the abyss of time ...
How would you even know a random girl from a village next to you is your relative ? Maybe your parents would know, sometimes, if they met her parents.
After a few generation track of common ancestry gets lost, unless the your family specifically tracks it. But on the positive side after a few generations the percentage of common genetic material is also reduced, with a power of 2, that makes mating with further relatives passable. Anything further than cousin is tolerable with limited disgust. But then repeating it in next generation is not the best idea. Maybe that's why nobles used to track their ancestry, to both avoid most direct inbreeding and to avoid accumulating genes of the same ancestor.
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Re: Too Few Men Existed for Me to Exist?

Postby stukolol » Wed Apr 10, 2019 2:05 pm

Now calclulate the inbred-ratio to get ~reasonable numbers and then draw it on a chart
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Re: Too Few Men Existed for Me to Exist?

Postby MadNomad » Thu Apr 11, 2019 9:14 pm

Ysh wrote:Now we can update previous chart with these new data. I use linear interpolation to calculate estimate global population in year that does not exist in above data set.
Image

And now we see quite the shock! :shock: :shock: :shock:
Only just 29 generation ago, around year 1091, I must have over 500 million ancestors, but there is only 300 million men existing in this year! How this disparity can be explained? Is planet Earth only 928 years old and God really creates 536,870,910 men in addition to Adam and Eve? Historical population estimates are not right and should be much higher? There is some flaw in my mathematics? No men today really exist? I am curious what the other forum friend can think of this conundrum. Thanks to you all as always for this consideration.


but did you count the dead ones? I think that some of the ancestors were dead ones that were not counted as members of global population back then.
I believe that this is the correct answer to this mystery.

Ysh wrote:
Asgaroth22 wrote:Let's say your wife is a very very distant cousin, your ancestors meet up at some point creating the same situation. There's probably a million things you're not accounting for, and I guess the guys who published the statistics had better ways of extrapolating this kind of data than a simple 2^n function

Why it must be more complicated? If I have 2 parent, 4 grandparent, 8 great-grandparent, 16 great-great-grandparent, then this seem like 2^n to me. How you will model this instead?.


Well, for example if you want to exist today, you need to have 1 person(yourself) this generation, but you also need 3 people (yourself+your parents) 1 generation ago + this generation
and 7 people (yourself+your parents+your grandparents) 2 generations ago + 1 generation ago + this generation

this can be caltulated the following way:

If aₙ=2ⁿ
then Sₙ=aₙ+Sₙ₋₁-1where S₀=a₀ would calculate the total number of ancestors from all generations since the one described with the "n", not just the ancestors from this certain generation


I hope that this posting will pleasure you!
Last edited by MadNomad on Sat Apr 13, 2019 11:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Too Few Men Existed for Me to Exist?

Postby Dondy » Thu Apr 11, 2019 11:49 pm

Genetically the best partner for you is your second cousin. A second cousin pair is the most fertile. It produces the most viable conceptions. In order for a conception to take place the two sets of genes have to be close enough but not a perfect match. If they are too different they simply can't join, which is why you can't cross a dog and a cat and get a litter. If they are a perfect match there will also be problems as many people carry recessive genes that are non viable. There has to be a dominant gene matched with that recessive or the conception will fail.

So if you all live in a tiny village and have to partner off with people who are genetically close to you, not only will there be people born with bad genes, but it will be harder and harder to produce kids at all. Say you put two women and two men into a space ship and start a colony on Mars with them. After a few generations they will almost certainly end up sterile because there will be no viable conceptions they can produce. This is a serious problem when trying to keep endangered species alive. If they are all very closely related it doesn't matter what you do, you can get the eggs to fertilize.

So throughout history we have often married our second or third cousins by preference and as long as some new blood came in from time to time - say a fifth cousin, it worked out very well, and was genetically different enough to avoid genetic disorders from in-breeding.

Genetically a decent sized community only needs to have eighty to a couple of hundred people. That will give you enough good partner choices but still keep from being so close that you definitely end up with birth defects. Bring in just one total stranger every generation and you will be doing fine.

Part of the reason we chose to marry our distant cousins was because they were likely to speak the same language and have the same culture as us. We might come from a fishing village and our fourth cousins would also come from fishing villages, so they could marry into our family and would have the right skills and experience that they could start working on the boats immediately, or mending the nets or whatever. Furthermore, our fifth cousins would have the kind of property we could use and would want - if you marry your fifth cousin who brings a fishing boat as part of his contribution to the new family, it is going to work out a lot better than if you marry a guy who knows how to weave and has a weaving loom, but you are living in an area where you can't run sheep or grow flax.

People did not and do not marry their sisters. But they do live in villages for hundreds of years and marry other people in those villages. If you do live in a village like that, you spend hours talking about other people and figuring out what their connection to you is. It's practically the only thing they talk about. So you know that this guy is your cousin's wife's nephew, and that guy is your uncle's father's first wife's son, and this stuff is really important.

We are also genetically programmed to usually prefer people who look a lot like us. Some percentage of the population is draw to people who don't look like them (exogamy), but most of us are primarily drawn to people who have the same kind of nose and the same kind of chin and the right cadence of voice, and whose knees turn out just the right amount (endogamy) . This is unconscious but consistent. Someone with a similar nose to yours is just going to look more handsome to you. This means that if you go to a village sixty miles from your own, you are more likely to pair off with whoever there is closer to you genetically - a long lost cousin of some sort. She's going to think you look pretty good for a stranger, and you're going to think she looks good for a stranger, and the next thing you know you've brought the genetic line back together again.
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Re: Too Few Men Existed for Me to Exist?

Postby MagicManICT » Fri Apr 12, 2019 6:06 am

Dondy wrote:Genetically the best partner for you is your second cousin. A second cousin pair is the most fertile. It produces the most viable conceptions. In order for a conception to take place the two sets of genes have to be close enough but not a perfect match. If they are too different they simply can't join, which is why you can't cross a dog and a cat and get a litter. If they are a perfect match there will also be problems as many people carry recessive genes that are non viable. There has to be a dominant gene matched with that recessive or the conception will fail.


Not sure where you learned genetics at, but... "cats and dogs" is not a good analogy when discussing genomes within a species. Cats have 38 chromosomes and dogs have 46. However, if you look at horses and donkeys, which are frequently cross-bred for mules, there's a pair missing from horses. Sheep and goats can crossbreed, but never have a successful birth, despite also only having a one pair difference. But within a species? That's like saying you can't breed a chihuahua with a great dane.

Yes, there are genetic defects within all of us that complicate reproduction. I don't think we want to live in that world that only encourages eugenics, though. (See the film "Gattaca.")
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Re: Too Few Men Existed for Me to Exist?

Postby Serpensio » Mon Apr 29, 2019 2:30 am

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Re: Too Few Men Existed for Me to Exist?

Postby DatSheep » Mon Apr 29, 2019 3:09 am

Okay okay this is cool and all ysh very smart but god isn't a person you can add in your family tree and inbreeding to any extent has happened and still happens. You have to account for that since it messes with the tree and I assume means less people in the tree.

Bruh moment: My dad's bro married his DIRECT fucking cousin smfh big alabama flashbacks ngl. Interestingly enough they don't have kids ¦]

But also some people have a teeny tiny bit of neanderthal dna in them, unlike others not in Europe or wherever that cross breeding happened. Idk if that even affects the talk of generations and stuff here but ye, that's interesting and does change up your family tree once you get that far back.

Is it really that common to be attracted to someone who looks like you? In my own humble experience I've seen a good amount of friends drawn to pretty different looking people, and personally I hate /cringe at anyone who ethnically looks like me. Idk how to explain it fully but it's not as uncommon as I first thought.
Yeah I understand there's more going on in the back of our minds than we think or want to admit but are similar features down to nose size and shape actually proven to be a factor for attraction in some/most people? Big oof :?
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Re: Too Few Men Existed for Me to Exist?

Postby Sollar » Mon Apr 29, 2019 9:27 am

You must of been really high when you made this thread ... It ain't even shitpost ... It's just nonsense
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Re: Too Few Men Existed for Me to Exist?

Postby MadNomad » Mon Apr 29, 2019 9:30 am

Sollar wrote:You must of been really high when you made this thread ... It ain't even shitpost ... It's just nonsense


go shitpost somewhere else!
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