RE: So we're all related!

>-----Original Message-----
>From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
>Behalf Of gordon brown
>Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 12:07 AM

>There are a couple of questions that this topic has gotten me thinking
>about.
>
>1. What are the chances that I am a physical descendant of Abraham? Many
>of Abraham's contemporaries have a number of descendants which might
>satisfy the sand-of-the-sea description (although not literally). The
>figure for Abraham would depend heavily on how much intermarriage there
>has been between his descendants and those not descended from him. This
>intermarriage may have been fairly common, especially when you consider
>the ten lost tribes of Israel and any others who lost their consciousness
>of their relation to Abraham.
>
>2. There may be many Christians who will jump to a conclusion similar to
>Vernon's. This could lead to the rise of another urban legend to hurt the
>credibility of Christians. Is there any way to nip an urban legend in the
>bud?

I went looking through my database for an article I had read in Atlantic
Monthly May 2002, called The Royal We. It was an article which talked
precisely about this kind of genetic relationship. The article says:

"Under the conditions laid out in his paper, the most recent common ancestor
of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was
someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past—only about 600
years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their
ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Before that date,
according to Chang's model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans
today increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation
prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to
be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or
all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80
percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living
today." p. 63

and

"This constant churning of people makes it possible to apply Chang's
analysis to the world as a whole. For example, almost everyone in the New
World must be descended from English royalty—even people of predominantly
African or Native American ancestry, because of the long history of
intermarriage in the Americas. Similarly, everyone of European ancestry must
descend from Muhammad. The line of descent for which records exist is
through the daughter of the Emir of Seville, who is reported to have
converted from Islam to Catholicism in about 1200. But many other,
unrecorded descents must also exist.

Chang's model has even more dramatic implications. Because people are always
migrating from continent to continent, networks of descent quickly
interconnect. This means that the most recent common ancestor of all six
billion people on earth today probably lived just a couple of thousand years
ago. And not long before that the majority of the people on the planet were
the direct ancestors of everyone alive today. Confucius, Nefertiti, and just
about any other ancient historical figure who was even moderately prolific
must today be counted among everyone's ancestors.

Toward the end of our conversation Humphrys pointed out something I hadn't
considered. The same process works going forward in time; in essence every
one of us who has children and whose line does not go extinct is suspended
at the center of an immense genetic hourglass. Just as we are descended from
most of the people alive on the planet a few thousand years ago, several
thousand years hence each of us will be an ancestor of the entire human
race—or of no one at all." p. 63-64

Now, to me the utterly fascinating thing about all this is that Nature
accepted an article whose conclusions effectively had been published in a
non-technical article a year and a half early. And Chang, one of the
co-authors, had previously published an article in 1999 (referred to but not
referenced by the Atlantic Article) entitled " ‘Recent Common Ancestors of
All Present-Day Individuals,’ Usually Nature only publishes new
revolutionary research. This clearly wasn't.
Received on Mon Oct 4 07:19:37 2004