[Avodah] Your Ancestors

[Simon Montagu]

On Sun, Dec 10, 2017 at 2:07 AM, Micha Berger <micha at aishdas.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 09, 2017 at 06:27:13PM +0200, Simon Montagu via Avodah wrote:
> : >      The answer, for people of European descent at least, is
> surprisingly
> : >      recent: 600 years. The common ancestor for every single person
> alive
> : >      on the planet today, no matter where, lived approximately 3,600
> years
> : >      ago. That means Confucius, Nefertiti, Socrates, and any figure
> from
> : >      ancient history that had children, is in some way your ancestor.
>
> : Unless I'm missing something, those last two sentences are a huge non
> : sequitur.
>
> The author is just saying that the same model that giver the result
> of 600 years for Euopeans gives a result of 3,600 for all of humanity.
>
>
That's not the non sequitur. The non sequitur is going from "we have a
common ancestor 3,600 years ago" to "Confucius and Socrates are your
ancestors". Confucius and Socrates lived around 2500 years ago, and how
does the author know that they had any living descendants?



> : I have a slightly different take-away from the article: it says that
> : everybody has a common ancestor who lived approximately 3,600 years ago.
> : Isn't that exactly what the Torah says?
>
> Well, really the model says that everyone who is alive today almost
> certainly (this is statistics, after all) descended from everyone who
> was alive 3,600 who has /any/ living descendents.


> Not that there was one such ancestor.
>

I haven't read the model, but the article you linked to talks several times
about "/a/ common ancestor", "/a/" person to whom all living people are
related", etc.


>
> Gut Voch!
> -Micha
>
> --
> Micha Berger             What you get by achieving your goals
> micha at aishdas.org        is not as important as
> http://www.aishdas.org   what you become by achieving your goals.
> Fax: (270) 514-1507              - Henry David Thoreau
>
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