The beginning of Murchie's chapter on human interconnection made the peculiar claim that no one on earth is less related than fiftieth cousins. I'm not sure about his reasoning. Mathematically, he walks through his thought process, conservatively assuming only two offspring per couple. But I think he fundamentally misses some things. It seems to me that I could not be so related to many of the people in Asia for example, or to Eskimos, whose populations diverged on the order of twenty thousand years ago. He also makes the claim that based on probability, everyone who lived before 700 AD is my ancestor. This too, I find outlandish. I do not see how any Korean, for example, could be in my family tree - that population diverged from the European population much too early.
This does bring up an interesting thought though. If it were possible to trace back my ancestry, I wonder how many it would encompass. As a European mutt (Lithuanian/Russian on one side, and unknown Western European on the other), I'm sure my line would include any interesting characters. I wonder if one day genetic testing would allow for digital reconstruction of lineages, based solely on genes and gene markers. I tend to think it couldn't be 100% accurate but would probably be quite informative.
I finished Sellars' Stoicism reader. The last chapter was on the proliferation of Stoic thought from antiquity to modern day. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Spinoza was perhaps the only philosopher to identify himself as a Stoic since Marcus Aurelius. I added Erasmus and a modern commentary on Stoicism by Lawrence Becker.
Portuguese has stagnated recently. I feel I need to mix things up a bit - I simply don't have the time that I did for Russian to just sit down and endlessly practice vocabulary.
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