How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality by Adam Rutherford

Author:Adam Rutherford
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781474611268
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2020-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

*The best estimates are that there have been around 107 billion members of our species, give or take a billion or so. This shuts down the popular myth that there are more people alive today than have ever lived. There are more people alive today than on any other day in history. But the notion that the quick outnumber the dead is wrong by an army numbering about 100 billion corpses.

* In order to calculate if anyone born in the 1970s was descended from Edward III, I counted how many descendants he had (until the number becomes fuzzy), and estimated the number of ancestors someone born in the 1970s would have at the same point in history. The question then becomes ‘what is the probability that any of your ancestors at that time were in the proportion of the population who were direct descendants of Edward III?’ He died in 1377 leaving thirteen children, six of whom had children themselves. I counted a total of 321 great-great-grandchildren, after which the tree becomes a bit too vague, but if we conservatively estimated that if each of these people on average had two children, then in the year 1600 Edward would have a total of around 20,544 descendants, which is large but far from impossible. The population of Britain at that time was around 4.2 million, which means that around 1 in 210 people was a direct descendant of Edward – approximately 0.5 per cent of the population. There will have been around fifteen generations between 1600 and 1975 and the number of ancestors doubles each generation up a family tree, meaning that a person born in 1975 should have a maximum of 32,768 ancestors in 1600 (assuming full outbreeding, which is very unlikely, but makes little numerical difference to the calculation). Therefore, each one of your 32,768 ancestors in the year 1600 has a 0.5 per cent chance of being a direct descendant of Edward III. If you reverse the question, and ask ‘what are the chances that none of your 32,768 ancestors in 1600 is in that 0.5 per cent?’, the calculation becomes: 0.995 × 1032,768 = 4.64 × 10-72. To get the answer to the original question, we subtract that from 1, which comes to: 0.999999999999 (etc.). If you have any broadly British ancestral lineage, you are descended from Edward III, and all of his regal ancestors too, including William the Conqueror, Æthelred the Unready, Alfred the Great and, in fact, literally every tenth-century European ruler and peasant.

*Though in the last few years, a few children have received mitochondrial genomes from a third genetic donor to cure diseases. ‘Three parent children’ is how the press is fond of describing them, but the truth is that it’s such a tiny amount of DNA that moniker is not really warranted.

*In reality, many Americans of European descent carry African ancestry, and many African Americans have a significant proportion European ancestry.

*The American Nazi Party asserts that they are not white supremacists, merely separatists. They also specifically want to ban modern art and rap music.

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