exFamily.org > chatboards > genX > archives > post #30782

Makes you think

Posted by Thinker on April 24, 2008 at 09:08:28

In Reply to: Re: In my eyes posted by Thinker on April 24, 2008 at 08:39:04:

Math has been called the enemy of religion because it breaks down traditional and religious notions.

In our perfect little bubble of the way things are supposed to be according to those notions:

Every one of us is the product of two biological parents
Both our parents are the product of two biological parents - a total of four different people (therefore we have four grandparents)
Our grandparents' parents are eight different people, and so on
If you keep counting backwards this way, 40 generations ago (about 1000 years ago), we are supposed have descended from 1,099,511,627,776 (that's more than a trillion!) different people

But there were only 310 million people on the entire earth back in 1000 AD, and there never has been a trillion people living on the earth in the last 1000 years or ever before, icluding all those who ever lived and died.

So how do you explain your very existence here?

Intermarriage and incest -- we marry cousins, often distant ones and often unawares; so-called racial purity is a myth because we are all mixed to some extent.