RE: [Marxism] Liberal Science, Socialist Conclusions?

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I hadn't followed this thread, but what Y.K. complains off--that "one of the
main flaws in Marx's genius was his alignment with the predictive spirit of
the natural sciences" smacks of the most overreaching features of what
became the bourgeois social sciences generally.

The statistical analysis in terms of ancestry is not really "predictive."  

I think I went through this on the list at one point, in connection to the
DaVinci Code Crapola.  If you go back five generations (say 125 years)--the
everyone born this year had an average of 32 great-great-great grandparents.


Go back another five generations (say 250 years) and each one of those 32
great-great-great grandparents had 32 great-great-great grandparents of
their own.  So everyone around today had to have 1,024 direct ancestors
roughly about the time around the time the British colonists were beginning
to move towards independence.  

Continue back another ten generations (roughly 500 years) and each of those
1,024 direct ancestors had 1,024 ancestors.  The math means that someone
today had 1,048,576 direct ancestors around the time the Europeans were
discovering America.  

Just for the heck of it, go back another 500 years, and every one of those
1,048,576 direct ancestors had 1,048,576.  That's 1,099,511,627,776 at a
time when it's estimated that there were about 250,000,000 humans on the
entire planet!  If we didn't have some of those ancestors doing double-duty,
the human race would have to have been drawing on other species.  

If you are mostly English in ancestry, you're statistically certain to be
related to almost everybody else of that background when you go back this
far.  But anyone of European ancestry is going to have a very large number
of Vikings, Jews, gypsies, etc. in those numbers.  Moreover, this is around
the time of the First Crusade, and wouldn't it be truly strange if, over
that 1,000 years, those massive numbers didn't include non-Europeans?  

My original point was that if you go back 2,000 years, the numbers are such
that we can be certain that if Jesus did have kids who had descendants, it'd
be all of us by this time.

And when you talk about 5,000 or 7,000 years ago--the overlap with be very
broad.

However, if these were exactly the same set, how would the DNA evidence
reflect distinctions of lineage (which they do) doing back further?

Solidarity!
Mark L. 





________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism