On supporting science journalism
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To the Editor of the SCIENTIFIC AMEEICAN: Few people realize the innumerable number of links which bind each one of us with our forefathers. Starting from the fact that we each have four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on, ten generations back, or a little more than three hundred years, there were 1,024 direct progenitors of each family living. Twenty generations would give over a million; and thirty generations, about one thousand years, say from the dat of the death of Alfred the Great, increases the total to the amazing figure of more than 1,094 millions. That is to say that each family represented on earth to-day had, thirty generations back, 1,094 millions of progenitors living at that time, that is contemporaries, or of the same generation; or about two-thirds of the total number of the computed inhabitants of the whole world to-day, which is estimated at about 1,500 millions. The thirty-first generation would give 2,198 millions, and soon, doubling with each generation until a few generations further back, long before the 5,000 to 6,000 years of authentic history is reached, which after all is but a mere fraction of the time that man has lived upon the earth, would yield a number for which there would not be standing room upon the globe; and this for one family only. Some would have to be canceled as being progenitors of more than one line of descentancestral duplicates, as they may be called; but this would not account for many, I imagine, unless people are very much more closely related by blood than is generally considered. On second thought, however, it may be that herein lies the solution of the difficulty. If so, it would prove that mankind are truly brethrenmuch more closely inbred, in a sense much more real than has been supposed. It should seem to be not an unreasonable assumption, in view of the figures given above, that the farther back we go, the more fully was the earth peopled, instead of the reverse. And yet historical writersFisher, for instance put the total population of England under the Tudors at less than two millions. Can any of your readers throw- any light upon this subject, or show where I have gone wrong in stating the problem, which fairly puzzles me New York. A. K. VENNING.
