[3l diesel]

I have just approved a waymark in "Silhouette Public Art" called " Starting Fourth" in Calgary, Alberta. A part of the long description says "It says, in a whimsical manner, that apart from slight surface differences, all people are cut from the same mold."

Ok, now how closely are we all related? Most would probably say "not related". But have a look at the following logic which I know has been touched on by others at other times. Now, how many biological parents do you have? Two? Right... how many biological parents did your parents have? Two for each, that is four grandparents? How many biological parents did they have? Two each, making eight great grandparents. So you get the drift. Starting at you, we have a geometric series based on powers of 2. You are 2^0 = 1, parents are 2^1 = 2, grandparents are 2^2 = 4, great grandparents are 2^3 = 8.

Ok, how about we say an "average" (just a working figure) of 4 generations per century.

Now keep the geometric series going backwards in time for say 1000 years. We will reach 2^39 = 549 755 813 888 . The current world population is around 7 000 000 000 - a somewhat lesser figure. According to http://desip.igc.org...lationmaps.html in 1350, (more recent than our 1000 year scenario) and the world population was just 350 000 000.

So where is the logic wrong - or are we all much more closely related than we might have thought??

[fi67]

The logic is not "wrong", just a too simplicistic first step that needs refinement.

Sometimes there is a remote relation between both parents, if we draw the time horizon far enough almost always. Some branches in the tree extinct, this happens to families as well as whole populations. We have almost no data about mobility, fertility and age expectations from pre-historic times.

All this considered turns the simple math into a really complicated beast.

According to several independent methods (genetics, linguistics and other sciences), there is a high chance that all contemporary human beings evolved from a small population living at the African east coast some hundred thousand years ago. From this point of view we are all related.

What does this mean for Waymarking? Should we be more tolerant against armchair visits, lazy submissions and inferior category proposals, because it stays in the family? I don't think so, but we could tell this our cousins in a nicer way than some of us do.