- Things that Matter
Family can actually be a triggering word, or concept.
It's bound up in hierarchies and relationships and has sublime connections to the heart.
For some of us - "Family" means something negative and un healthy - a thing to avoid and leave behind.
Some claim that they have found a family at church or work or the bowling alley or the bar. I've hear it said.
- The Thayne Family Line
Because of convictions held by members of the Thayne family (mostly the brothers, sisters, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law of my dad, Rey,) I think we have some sort of assurance of the family line.
I read something interesting about the family line.
If a man and his wife look back to their ancestors, they will quickly identify that from a reproductive perspective, each of them would have to have two parents.
Fulano and Fulana represent two people. We count two.
AnoPapa and AnoMama would be Fulano's parents.
AnaPapa and AnaMama would be Fulana's parents.
(See what I did there, using the suffixes for parents?)
In combination with the the two, we now count four for the prior generation.
AnoPapa has two parents, and AnoMama has two parents. That counts four.
AnaPapa has two parents, and AnaMama has two parents. That counts four.
Gen0 : Two people
Gen -1 Four people
Gen -2 Eight people.
- Rice on a chess board
There is that old riddle of the rice and the chessboard.
\- If you had a chessboard \(32 squares\) and you put one grain of rice on the first square\, doubled that for the next square and doubled *that* for the next, so on and so forth. By the 32nd square you'd have more rice that you can imagine.
- Asymptotes
This exponential growth means that after a little while you approach infinity.
- Negative Totes?
So when we look at our example of generations - the math of it seems to suggest that the further we go back (and it wouldn't be very long) we would have infinite ancestors.
Infinite ancestors?
How could that work?
The best science and many doctrinaires (I just made that up) suggest that all of humanity began with one man and one woman.
Biblical Adam and Biblical Eve, or Genetic Adam and Mitochondrial Eve, perhaps.
No.
You'd only find yourself in a world of infinite ancestors if any couple only had one child, or that there could not be mixtures of couples, step children for example.
What happens is that going back several generations, we'll find that there are more common ancestors in the line.
- A web, or a tree? Maybe
It could be said that you're part of a family web, or a family tree. But it's a pretty funky tree.
From a root - AnaGpa and AnaGma (if you will) serve as a root for the family, but the branches can hook up (oh my!) and make more splits, roots on roots.
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