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Overnight Short: The Jockstrap Raiders

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Obdicut (Now with 2% less brain)2/27/2013 5:29:52 am PST

re: #53 freetoken

Which, given D descendants from ancestor A at generation G, will tell you how widely A’s DNA has been propagated downstream. Thus one can estimate the probability of the share of overall population have A’s DNA.

It still doesn’t in the least bit support a contention that after ten generations there’s only a 45% chance of inheriting DNA. It’s not a paper that’s directly relevant, in fact, it just complicates the math.

What we’re asking is what the probability is at generation N that any genes were inherited from an ancestor. The probability of two descendants sharing that exact same gene is mathematical problem that depends on the probability of that, but it doesn’t inform the probability.

In addition, this is even more complicated because I may have gene M and my ancestor may have gene M, but I could have inherited that gene from a different ancestor. What you seem to be asserting is that a random walk of ten generations of crossover means that there’s only a 45% chance that one of the 30,000 genes that we inherit having come from an ancestor ten generations ago. Just a blank look at the math would seem to say that’s wrong.