Fun with powers of two
Our cover story for this issue is a fascinating essay about genealogy by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Recent years have seen a flurry of genealogical revelations--from the news that Al Sharpton is descended from slaves owned by the ancestors of Strom Thurmond to the disclosure that Tom Hanks is related to William the Conqueror, Shakespeare, and Henry VIII. What does this all mean? According to Pinker, very little. The mathematics of genealogy dictate that any single one of our distant ancestors accounts for only a minuscule fraction of our genetic makeup. What Pinker calls "the geometric decay of relatedness" suggests that, for all the fun we might have with genealogy, discovering where we came from isn't nearly as important as we would like it to be.When I read things like this it is a struggle to avoid falling back on phrases like "intuitively obvious" and "every educated person" which, while satisfying to say, are usually not the most rhetorically effective. And yet, it is a struggle. I don't need Steven Pinker to tell me that what this all means is nothing.
posted at 6:05 AM
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