Re: ANCESTRY QUESTION?

Daniel A Ashlock (danwell@iastate.edu)
18 Jan 1995 16:39:05 GMT

In article <3fhs06$nek@ns5.nba.TRW.COM>, rsm@PROBLEM_WITH_INEWS_DOMAIN_FILE (Robert S. Margulies) writes:
>decker@spt.tec.sc.us wrote:
>: How can we possibly have more ancestors in a coexisting generation than
>: the total known population of the earth?
>
>: I know for a fact that I have a mother and a father who each has a mother
>: and a father, etc... The direct ancestral chart would look like so:
>: Generation Population
>: 1 2 (Mother and father)
>: 2 4 (grandparents)
>: 3 8 (greatgrandparents)....
>: 20 1,048,576
>: 30 1,073,741,841
>: Going backwards it does not take too long to run into a problem.
>
>: What am I missing? Please email your response to me. Thanks
>: Art Decker
>: decker@spt.tec.sc.us
>
>There are those among us who feel that if you go back only a little
>further, the process converges at a limiting value of 2. See, e.g.,
>Genesis.

Of course these feeling require you ignore recently published
scientific evidence that the series has a local minimum of about
100,000 a whole lot farther back :-).

For that matter, it require you be able to claim an exponentially
growing series can converge to 2 :-) :-).

Gee, those wacky literalists.


-- 

Dan Ashlock