Text 2574, 109 rader
Skriven 2006-06-28 21:13:58 av DAVE SACERDOTE (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av MICHAEL LOO
Ärende: noggin 882
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RH> seafaring Hanschkas a few generations back, and you never know what a
RH> sailor will get up to....
 
ML> The claim was made that I have blood from Marco Polo,
ML> or at least one of his wayward associates.

You may be interested in this.

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We're all Jesus' children
'Da Vinci Code' got its genealogy wrong. If anyone is descended 
from Jesus, it's all of us.
By Steve Olson, STEVE OLSON is the author of "Mapping Human 
History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins."

May 19, 2006

DOES JESUS have a secret line of descendants who are living today? 
It's an oddly appealing idea. We tend to think of ancestry in terms 
of bloodlines, in which some individuals are descended from famous 
ancestors and others are not. And the idea echoes deeper religious 
themes of individuals and groups favored by God.

But this is one idea in "The Da Vinci Code," which opens today in 
theaters worldwide, that just won't wash. Jesus couldn't have just 
a few descendants living today. If anyone alive today is descended 
from Jesus, then so are most of the people on the planet.

ADVERTISEMENT
This absurd-sounding statement is an inevitable consequence of the 
workings of ancestry. People may have just a few descendants in the 
two or three generations after they lived, but after that the number 
of descendants explodes. For a population to remain the same size, 
every adult has to have an average of two children who grow to 
adulthood and have children. So the number of descendants for the 
average person grows exponentially — two children, four grandchildren, 
eight great-grandchildren, and so on. In just 10 generations — 
roughly 250 years — an average person can have more than 1,000 
descendants.

Of course, no one is average. Some people have lots of children; 
some have none. But over time the fecund and the barren balance 
each other out. Also, a person's descendants eventually start 
having children with each other. That slows the rate of growth 
f a person's descendants, but usually not much, at least in the 
short term.

It's virtually impossible to "manage" a genealogical lineage so 
that a person has a limited number of descendants. The lineage 
would quickly go extinct in the occasional generation in which 
all of a person's descendants do not have children (or their 
children die). And a managed lineage inevitably would "leak" — 
someone would begin having children at a normal pace, and the 
usual process of growth would commence.

In real genealogies, a person's descendants either peter out 
within a few generations or begin to grow exponentially. That's 
why people who came to America on the Mayflower now have 
thousands of descendants. People who lived just a few centuries 
earlier have many millions of descendants.

The same observations would apply to Jesus, although we'll 
never know if he really had children. But let's assume that 
he did, and that he also had a lower than average number of 
descendants — say 500 in the year AD 250. Where would they 
have lived? Those centuries were a time of great ferment in 
the Roman Empire. Although most of Jesus' descendants probably 
would have lived in the Middle East, at least a few would 
have moved as far away as modern-day Italy and central 
Asia (whether as soldiers, traders or slaves).

Many of these individuals also would have had 500 to 1,000 
descendants 250 years later. And these tens of thousands of 
descendants of Jesus likely would have been scattered along 
trade routes from western Europe to southern Africa to 
eastern Asia. After another 250 years, Jesus would have had 
millions of descendants. Repeat that cycle five more times 
and the whole world begins to fill up with descendants of 
Jesus.

Essentially, whether you have descendants is an all-or-nothing 
proposition in the long run, as two coauthors and I showed 
in an article in the scientific journal Nature a couple of 
years ago. If a person has four or five grandchildren, that 
person will almost certainly be an ancestor of the entire
world population two or three millenniums from now. And if 
a person lived longer than two or three millenniums ago, 
that person is either an ancestor of everyone living today
or of no one living today.

The idea that we all could be descended from Jesus takes 
some getting used to. After all, if we're all descended 
from Jesus, and Jesus is the son of God, that's a pretty 
illustrious bloodline. But don't let it go to your head. 
You're also descended from Pontius Pilate and Judas, as 
long as they produced the requisite four or five grandchildren.

We're all descended from beggars and kings, judges and 
murderers, merchants and slaves. We're caught up in webs 
of ancestry — a big, tangled, sometimes dysfunctional family. 


(Original article appears at http://tinyurl.com/rzrq4)

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Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, 
minutus carborata descendum pantorum
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