Consider the facts: exponentially, if you married and had two children, and they had two children, then in 1000 years you would have 50 generations of offspring totalling 1,125,899,907,000,000 grand children or 1.1 quadrillion offspring. Compared to this, the world population today is only approaching 7 billion. Royalty survive and multiply profusely - peasants die out. We are "ALL" related to famous Kings, Queens, Royalty, Prophets, maybe even Jesus - but so what! - in the end all of us are nobody. And throughout our history on earth, "nobody" were ALL of us. "Millions of people have provable descents from medieval monarchs," said Mark Humphrys, a genealogy enthusiast and professor of computer science at Dublin City University in Ireland. "The number of people with unprovable descents is massive." By the same token, for every king in a person's family tree there are thousands and thousands of nobodies whose births, deaths and lives went completely unrecorded by history. We'll never know about them, because until recently vital records were a rarity for all but the noble classes." Take King Edward III, who ruled England during the 14th century and had nine children who survived to adulthood. Among his documented descendants are presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Zachary Taylor, both Roosevelts), authors (Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning), generals (Robert E. Lee), scientists (Charles Darwin) and actors (Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, Brooke Shields). Some experts estimate that 80 percent of England's present population descends from Edward III. Humphrys estimates that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, appears on the family tree of every person in the Western world. The proposed genealogy runs through Muhammad's daughter Fatima. Her husband Ali, also a cousin of Muhammad, is considered by Shiite Muslims the legitimate heir to leadership of Islam. Ali and Fatima had a son, al-Hasan, who died in 670. About three centuries later, his ninth great-grandson, Ismail, carried the line to Europe when he became Imam of Seville. The Abbadid dynasty, founded by Ismail's son, to Muhammad, was celebrated for making Seville a great cultural center at a time when most of Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. The last emir in that dynasty was supposed to have had a daughter named Zaida, who is said to have changed her name to Isabel upon converting to Christianity and marrying Alfonso VI, king of Castile and Leon. Yet there is no good evidence demonstrating that Isabel, who bore one son by Alfonso VI, is the same person as Zaida. So the line between Muhammad and the English monarchs probably breaks again at this point. But if you give the Zaida/Isabel story the benefit of the doubt too, the line eventually leads to Isabel's fifth great-granddaughter Maria de Padilla. Maria married another king of Castile and Leon, Peter the Cruel. Their great-great-granddaughter was Queen Isabel, who funded the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Her daughter Juana married a Hapsburg, and eventually gave rise to a Medici, a Bourbon and long line of Italian princes and dukes, spreading the Mohammedan line of descent all over Europe. Finally, 43 generations from Mohammed, you reach an Italian princess named Marina Torlonia. Her granddaughter is Brooke Shields. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13662242
As I posted recently on another thread, DNA analysis recently showed that one out of every two hundred people is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. In Asia it's more like one out of twelve. Obviously, from a purely mathematical standpoint, the farther back we trace lineage, the greater the likelihood that everyone is related to everyone else. No family tree can be larger than the total number of humans alive at any one node. At 20 years per generation, which was the norm until a couple of centuries ago, one need only go back to around 1400CE to need 512 million ancestors at a time when the earth's population had been stabilized for several hundred years at about 400 million people. By constraining a family tree from becoming wider over time, mathematics forces it to fold in on itself. Looking back this means that some of one's great^27-grandparents appear on more than one branch. Looking down this means that some of one's lineal descendants are committing incest, in the strict biological sense, because they don't have computers documenting 30-generation family trees and have no way of knowing they are distant relatives. The folding becomes tighter as we probe back to the end of the Neolithic Era 10,000 years ago when the global ecosystem, augmented by agriculture but as yet unaltered by civilization, supported only somewhere between one and ten million humans. Or we can go back three million years to that single tribe of early hominids who begat all of us via Lucy, the single female australopithecine who sits alone as the head of all matrilineal branches on every human's family tree.
Okay ...if that's true, then why are there so fuckin' many peasants in the world today? And, I might add, why were there always so fuckin' many peasants throughout history? Baron Max
So, ...why stop there? Why not go on back another few million years and say that we're all related to the first single-celled animal? Baron Max
Sure they did. And the pure peasant kids mixed with the bastard peasant/noble hybrids. Mixing mixing mixing. Of course, there is no documented 'peasant' gene. That I'm aware of...
Hmm, okay. But what about the peasants who just kept breeding with other peasants? I mean, there were lots more peasants than royalty, so it stands to reason that at least a few pure-bred peasants survived. Therefore, we can't all be descendants of royalty. Well, that would, of course, be that collection of genes that did NOT have any royalty genes, right? If we can recognize royalty genes, then those WITHOUT that gene are, presumably, peasants. Baron Max
Yeah. That's a bit of hyperbole on Valich's part, I believe. The figure quoted in the article is 'millions'. There's a lot more than millions of people out there. But, let's turn it around. Millions are descendants of royalty, yes? How many millions more are ancestors of royalty, eh? That's the question.
I was thinking more along the lines of new noble lineages being established than a continuation of the past lineages.
So you think people will get tired of democracy and make random people king of various countries? Or did you mean space colonisation? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
1. There is no need to get rid of democracy in order for noble and royal lineages to be founded. Although, it is likely that there will be periods in the future sans democracy. Question: Do you believe that democracy is so powerful as to remain the preferred form of government throughout the existence of the human species? 2. There are more positions of noble title than 'king'. 3. While it is possible that random lottery might, at some point, be the criteria for noble entitlement; there are far more methods than this and most of these other methods are more logical and more likely to be the chosen method at any given time. 4. Space colonization. Earth colonization. Ocean colonization. Intestinal colonization. Whatever. The future is a big room.
The big problem with democracy is that everyone gets to vote, regardless of whether they're smart enough and well enough informed to understand the issues, mature enough to be guided by reason and not just emotion, and decent enough to not sell their votes for promises of entitlement or outright fraud. Politicians appeal to our most destructive instincts such as fear, greed and revenge, and then, having tapped into that part of our spirits, run the elections more in the style of entertainers than statesmen. The current U.S. election with its negative campaigning and reduction of complicated issues to bumper-sticker slogans is democracy at its worst. Mind you, I don't believe that any other system of government which has ever been tried will work any better than democracy (or representative democracy) in the long run. But I do hope that before too long we come up with either a more enlightened version of democracy or something new and better. The current political system impairs democracy by offering positions of incredible power based solely on the candidates' ability to compete with each other in a contest with virtually no rules at all. The winners are selected only for the strength of their desire to wield that power and their willingness to do anything they can get away with to attain it. It's no surprise that we so often end up with leaders who reinforce humanity's most evil instincts: vengeance, violence, and disdain for the well being of others. The USA is regarded as one of the most effectively operating democracies among the large, powerful nations. Yet its current leaders are as great a threat to the survival of civiliation as those of many of the nations they teach us to hate and fear.
Don't know. But historically, how many monarchies have turned into republics, or at least constitutional monarchies, compared to the number of democracies that have turned into pure monarchies? A number have turned into dictatorships, of course, but even they pay lip service to democracy by not actually crowning themselves. Question: do you distinguish between monarchs and dictators? As far as I can tell it's just a matter of style. But the current fashion seems to be dictators (military garb rather than robes and crowns), so if you do distinguish between them it might be quite a while before 'real' monarchs come back. I think the traditional methods are (1) be more charismatic and a bigger murderer than your peers or (2) be directly descended from an ancestor satisfying (1). The random lottery sounds more fun to me.
************* M*W: Children by kings and concubines were still educated in the palace along with legitimate heirs. They retained the same rights as the non-bastards. So, it more likely we are descended from the bastards instead of the kingly heirs. What difference does it make, anyway, I still have to pay my own bills.
************* M*W: Have you checked South Central Los Angeles lately? Detroit innercity? Southwest Atlanta? Washington, DC? Appalachia? Memphis, Tennessee? The Mississippi Delta? Louisiana bayous? Rio Grande border towns? American Indian reservations? And every crack house in America, to name a few.
