Everyone on Earth is your cousin (2015)
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Re: Everyone on Earth is your cousin (2015)
#2Re: Everyone on Earth is your cousin (2015)
#3https://archive.md/URif7
There's a link to the original article at the top of the page: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/your-family-past-present-and-...
Re: Everyone on Earth is your cousin (2015)
#4This article made me wonder about an idea I’ve been thinking about for years.
There are people who have prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, the inability to recognize familiar faces. I’m not exactly a super recogniser, but I have an unusual ability to remember a face.
Beyond these two extremes, would it be possible to recognize a face you’ve never seen before as a possible relative, and has such a thing ever occurred, and what is the mechanism behind it?
I’ve read stories about putative pheromones and such, but that seems to be somewhat on the fringe.
So to further refine my question: can we recognize (visually or otherwise) strangers as potential relatives in some way by sense perception, if they are closer to us on the cone of ancestry?
Re: Everyone on Earth is your cousin (2015)
#5This article made me wonder about an idea I’ve been thinking about for years. There are people who have prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, the inability to recognize familiar faces. I’m not exactly a super recogniser, but I have an unusual ability to remember a face. Beyond these two extremes, would it be possible to recognize a face you’ve never seen before as a possible relative, and has such a thing ever…
Somewhat related documentary:
Twinsters 2015 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2980626/
It's good.
Re: Everyone on Earth is your cousin (2015)
#6> Now I feel special and important and also I feel irrelevant and meaningless.
There's an infinite number of ways to end up at this feeling+realization.
Personally, I reached this when I got interested in cosmology (PBS Space Time!!).
I invoke Nihilistic (existential nihilism) ideas. Because it's not hard to end up at the conclusion that everything is meaningless - you create your own meaning.
I recognize lots of problems attempting to apply this at scale, but it works for me personally.
Re: Everyone on Earth is your cousin (2015)
#7There are a few particularly interesting points when you go back up your ancestor tree. First, there is a point where some ancestor of yours is an ancestor of everyone else currently living (and so will also be an ancestor of everyone else to come). This is the "most recent common ancestor" point.
Go farther back and you reach the "identical ancestors point" (also known as the "all common ancestors point" or the "genetic isopoint"). The is the most recent point where everyone alive either is an ancestor of everyone currently living or has no living descendants.
Even farther back is the "Mitochondrial Eve" (or "matrilineal most recent common ancestor"). This is like the "most recent common ancestor" except only counts matrilineal descent. I.e., it is the most recent point where there is a woman that all currently living people can trace their ancestry to entirely through women.
There's a similar point for the "Y-chomosomal Adam" via patrilineal descent.
It is believed that the identical ancestor point is less than 15000 years ago. Note that this is after the Neanderthals went extinct. It follows that since there are people alive today with Neanderthal ancestry, there must have been people alive at the identical ancestor point who had Neanderthal ancestry and who have descendants alive today, and so by the definition of the identical ancestor point everyone alive today is a descendent of all such people. Hence, we can conclude that every current human has Neanderthal ancestry.
Same goes for the Denisovans.
Note that this doesn't mean that everyone today has Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA. We only have enough genes to have genes from all our ancestors back for 15 or so generations. Because of this you can have someone who is an ancestor of yours but you have none of their DNA.
Re: Everyone on Earth is your cousin (2015)
#8There are a few particularly interesting points when you go back up your ancestor tree. First, there is a point where some ancestor of yours is an ancestor of everyone else currently living (and so will also be an ancestor of everyone else to come). This is the "most recent common ancestor" point. Go farther back and you reach the "identical ancestors point" (also known as the "all common ancestors point" or the "gen…
Thank you, I learned a lot from your comment.
It also occurred to me that since only about half of a parent's genes are passed on, a person can have had Neanderthal ancestry and for whatever reason the Neanderthal genes were not passed on.
Re: Everyone on Earth is your cousin (2015)
#9> Now I feel special and important and also I feel irrelevant and meaningless. There's an infinite number of ways to end up at this feeling+realization. Personally, I reached this when I got interested in cosmology (PBS Space Time!!). I invoke Nihilistic (existential nihilism) ideas. Because it's not hard to end up at the conclusion that everything is meaningless - you create your own meaning. I recognize lots of pro…
This seems more like a perspectivism, egoism, or absurdism than nihilism. Ultimately, nihilism is the position that even any meaning you create is likewise inherently meaningless. To create your own meaning, and maintain that it is meaningful, is a refutation of nihilism, not its embrace.
Re: Everyone on Earth is your cousin (2015)
#10This article made me wonder about an idea I’ve been thinking about for years. There are people who have prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, the inability to recognize familiar faces. I’m not exactly a super recogniser, but I have an unusual ability to remember a face. Beyond these two extremes, would it be possible to recognize a face you’ve never seen before as a possible relative, and has such a thing ever…
On some level, yes: we can generally distinguish human faces from chimpanzee, gorilla, and other primate faces. In general, though, our facial recognition has some quirks that make more fine-grained identification of relatedness hard. For example if I shave my beard it takes people a moment to recognize me, especially if I do not give them any clues. Also note that if we had a reliable way to identify degrees of relationship tribal marks would be far less common since tribal affinity could be detected automatically.
In general ape facial recognition is oriented toward familiarity, not relatedness. This makes sense given the patterns of social behavior in apes -- fission/fusion social groups, individuals leaving their childhood group and joining a new group as adults, etc. It also makes sense given that establishing trust (or degrees of trust) is one of the primary functions of facial recognition, and people often betray the trust of their close relatives. Familiarity is also more general, since we are often familiar with our close relatives but can also be familiar with others, and the complexity of ape social groups requires a more general kind of recognition.