Many famous people have no descendants, at least direct ones. Mark Twain comes to mind, and maybe Abe Lincoln. The high infant mortality rates of the past destroyed many lineages. One of my long ago ancestors was born just a few months before his mom died of plague. My own mother almost died at birth, and if it weren’t for my physician great great grandmother, I would not be here. So far, 2 close calls for me. And there might be more such thin threads of my existence, and maybe I don’t want to know how many.
Only “be home by curfew”. Parents didn’t behave the way they do on TV. If I needed to use the car, I asked. If I needed a dress, I asked (or borrowed one from a friend). I didn’t teach my daughters anything like you’re suggesting - just “do your homework”, “stay out of trouble”, “don’t do drugs”, “clean your room”, etc. They learned social skills from their friends and television.
I think we learn our social skills from our peers at school, and it begins pretty early on.
Read about:
To summarize:
At some point in the near past (not more than about 15,000 year ago) every human alive at that time is either an ancestor of every living human or an ancestor of no living human.
The interesting question, which I don’t know the answer to, is what fraction of of the humans at the identical ancestor point are in the former vs the latter group.
If we take the stated 15K years as the magic number, and 20 years as the average generation time for most of that human history, that suggests there are 15000/20 = 750 generations of humans betwixt then & now.
It doesn’t take long to extinguish or amplify everybody into one camp or the other.
So you and I are 749th cousins. Cool.
Can I crash on your couch?
Some theoretical estimates have a most recent common ancestor more recent than 15,000 years ago, and suggest that we might all be as close as 50th cousins.
I have three bio kids, it seems likely that at least one of them will have kids, so my DNA will live on for a while.
The 15K years number was to the ACA, not the MRCA.
As the wiki cite says, the MRCA is a bunch more recent than 15K years.
DNA sneak-bragging.
I certainly would be thrilled with grand daughters from my daughters, who have X great grandmothers on mothers side more than I know of before them
I’m shocked this thread has gone so long without any mention of a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.
My favorite take on the subject of how we got here comes from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, and I’ll let the opening speak for itself (sadly the rest of the book can be something of a bore at times, how I wish an editor had been there to ride herd on him).
Let’s set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored.
Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo-which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time.
Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.
As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed deathmachines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet.
Niiice.
Well, AFAICT not more significantly than it does in your collateral relatives such as siblings’ (or parents’ siblings) descendants, if any.
For example, on average an individual shares about equal amounts of DNA with a grandchild as with a nibling (niece or nephew).
The extent to which you as an individual are making a significant and individually unique genetic contribution to a “line” of descendants is pretty short-lived.
Just think. Of all the female Homo saps alive at the time of the hypothetical Eve, only she has any descendants today. It is provable that every line dies out eventually with probability 1.
Although I have 3 kids and 6 grandkids, my wife’s MtDNA line is ending since we had one daughter and she has just one son (and is 58).
That is incorrect. All female-only lineages converge to Mitochondrial Eve. There are many mixed female-male lineages that go to her contemporaries.
Please compare:
mt-Eve (MRCA of every all-female lineage of current population) is 150,000 years ago.
Identical ancestor point (latest time when total population is either ancestor of everyone or no one currently alive) is about 15,000 years ago.
MRCA (most recent common ancestor of current population) is about 2,000 years ago.
I rather like that turn of phrase.
I’ve got a couple of kids and they are too young to be thinking about their plans.
I’m one of five children and three of us have offspring while two of my siblings don’t have any. On my mother’s side, I’m one of 34 cousins, and a really high percent of the cousins have multiple kids. Yes, most remain Mormons.
My son was one of the latter great-grandkids and was number 100. I have no idea how many g-g-grandkids there are.
My wife is Taiwanese, and it’s important in their culture to continue the family name to take care of the ancestors. My wife is one of three daughters, and the others don’t have children.
Her father has a couple of sisters, but his nephews and nieces all have the last names of the fathers.
If I were Taiwanese, our kids would have my last name, but because I’m a foreigner, they have my wife’s last name for their Taiwan names (and my last name for their American names). Consequently, my son is the “only hope” for carrying on the family name (as any potential children for my daughter would likely have the father’s last name).
And so goes the patriarchal thinking, none of which my wife nor I care about.
My mum’s maiden name is the extremely unusual Eells, a product of South Britain. We can’t find anyone else (related) with the name, and I (my bother, sister, and our children) have our much more boring typically English surname, inherited from our Dad.
She seems to be the last. I don’t even know what Eells means, though I reckon it is linked to the unpalitable fish.
My family line will continue but only through my cousins. My dad’s brother had six kids, five of whom have spawned, some of them many many times (they’re the Mormon wing of the family). But I have no blood siblings, and I’m not reproducing. Too much bipolar and autism (including myself) in the bloodline, I’m in my fifties so even if I started tomorrow, I’d be seventy by the time my immediate descendent hits uni and I have no hopes for the general liveability of the planet by that point. I think I expected to have kids back when I was one, but life happens as it does.
It’s pretty easy to see that this must be false, in fact. Consider: She had at least two daughters who themselves had children. Each of those daughters had a finite list of partners. Each of those partners had a mother. At least one of those partners’ mothers’ must also be an ancestor of people today.