Zemerge Project

But have you ever wondered how you got here – in the most biologically fundamental sense? and what will you leave behind when you are gone? how has your existence changed the human genome for generations to come?

First let’s start from you and trace back in time. This is you, and let’s just assume you were born in say 1980.

You have two parents born in the 50s, the DNA instruction set that molded you into existence comes from the combination set of your parents instruction sets.

Each of your parents have themselves two parents (your grandparents) that came into existence the same way you did back in the 20s.

So continuing backwards and assuming a generation takes on average 20 years from now on, you get 8 grand-grand parents at the turn of the century.

Then 16 grad-grad-grad parents, and continuing your ancestry this number doubles with each generation resulting in 512 at the end of the 18th century, [over 16k ancestors in the 17th century, and over a million ancestors in the middle of the 16th century! and over a 274 billion ancestors at the beginning of the 13th century,] a ridiculous number a millenia ago, and just a silly number two millenia ago!! With this exponential trend you would have more ancestors then there is observable particles in the universe (~10 to power of 78?) back around 5300 years ago!!!

Clearly there is an assumption overlooked in this logic? This assumption is of course assuming that each of your ancestors is a unique individual living in the past. In reality the farther in the past you go back in your lineage the higher the ancestral saturation (or coalescence of the genome) you achieve within the population. So what does this mean?

Well it means that a normal looking family tree looking like this, with the next generation … can become looking like this!

Now I know what your thinking – my family tree has certainly none of that! But with couple extra generations back then the previous illustration I would almost guarantee that all of our family lineages start looking like that, how am I so certain?

Lets see, back in the time when Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, or 23 generations ago so 2 to the power of 23 which is over 8 million, at the same time Europe had an estimated population of 70 million people. So as you can see in reality there are patches of duplicates in your ancestry tree and the more frequent they become – it becomes statistically impossible the more farther back in time you go not to have them.

Look at it in another example, George W. Bush and Barack Obama are 11th cousins – yes that is not surprising at all, I’m pretty sure I’m 11th cousin away from a significant chunk of the human population – except who has records going back to 17th century of their family tree anyways? remember at the beginning of the 17th century all of us had a linage of about 250K leaves in this family tree – the chances that you and I share one of these leaves – is fairly high!

In 2003, Douglas Rohde of MIT produced a paper describing a complex computer simulation performed with human migration patterns and population sizes of the past to paint the picture of the intermingled human family tree and to find our common ancestry.

Some of his conclusions are that the most recent common ancestor of everyone living today (so a person in the past that everyone alive today can call them their direct ancestor) may have lived between 300BC and 100AD. Furthermore, given that some populations were remote and intermingling did not happen as frequent, he estimates that back in 5400BC everyone alive was either an ancestor to ALL of us, or to no one alive today – so if you pick a random person from 5400BC they are either ancestor to every single living person today – or they are a extinct branch where no one today is an ancestor to them – in fact he estimated that once you go beyond 5400BC we are all descendants of around 60% of the population while the other 40% becomes extinct lineages.

There is a saying that if an ancient Egyptian had sex 5 mins later then everyone one living today would be different! since we would all be descendants of his child and his child would be ever so slightly different – and as you are aware of the chaotic butterfly effect – small changes in the past can seed wild shifts in the future outcomes.

What does this mean about you and the future, well just place yourself in the shoes of the Egyptian and now realize that you have the power to effect the entire human population of the far future!

As you can see, your family tree becomes intermingled after some time and becomes to look like a mingled bush rather then a tree.

Zooming out you can imagine how your specific genome has coalesced over some time period from the entire past population and will likely saturate everyone in the far future. In a way all of us come from the same identities – and return back to become the same identities – I often like to forget about my ego, and return to a though process placing myself as the whole manifesting an instance and then returning into the whole – try pondering that!

Zooming out even farther you can imagine how new species are forked when two bushes are separated from long time isolation of the species genome.

There is nothing mysterious or profound by the mechanism by which genes propagate throughout a species, it is simply an inevitable emergent chemical algorithm that continuously improves the recipe of the species genome to suit its environment. Positive and rewarding recipe changes propagate and eventually saturate the entire species, and negative or harmful genes slowly fade out and are pushed out of the species genome.

As you can see we really are one global human extended family, and to extend further just one organic family that includes all living beings on this planet, so lets treat our own family members like they should be treated – with equality, respect and dignity.

There is something else we can learn from this, as you can see living organisms in a way use the scientific method to plot direction, through continuous genome recipe verification and improvement against the physical environment – no one decides or votes which genes propagate, no ones opinion matters, nature simply follows its algorithm of continuous relentless testing and verification and adaptation to its environment by continuous coalescing and recombining the species genome. What if we were to mimic some of these natural algorithms to plot the direction for our social-cultural direction, to solve the modern problems our society is facing today and ascend to our diverse, creative and adaptive future using the same algorithms life has taken us here so far.