Susan and I joined Ancestry.com several years ago. I think that we were in Gila, NM photographing the stars, and we saw an Ancestry special offer. Susan asked whether we might each buy a membership as a Christmas present for the other. It was sometime in November or December, and it was cold. We were in bed watching some series like Iron Fist, I think. It was all very romantic, and I forked out the dollars for two Ancestry memberships.
Weeks later, having submitted an aliquot of spittle and entered some personal information into the Ancestry portal, we began getting notes about other folks on Ancestry who were likely 2nd or 3rd cousins. At this point, there are many. A few of them have reached out to make contact – most often people looking for a parent or other relative from whom they were separated when very young. This kind of thing has actually happened in my own extended family. Adoptees have a greater curiosity about their biological family than the rest of us do, if for no reason than most of us know our close biological relatives, and adoptees do not always.
It turns out, if you study human genetics, that we are all 16th cousins or closer – give or take a generation or two. Where 3rd cousins share maybe 2-3% of their unique DNA markers, at the 16th level of relationship, there are hardly any unique DNA markers that show we are related except as homo sapiens. That’s a good thing, of course, because it means that if we mate with such distant cousins, the odds of lethal genetic errors affecting our progeny are very small. Consanguinity is a bitch; it turns out – just ask the lines of European royals. The Hapsburg line comes to mind.
I find myself thinking about our biological relationships, yours and mine, this evening because Rand Paul wants money for his Kentucky cousins who need disaster recovery dollars. The same Rand Paul has repeatedly voted against disaster relief for his cousins in California, Puerto Rico and any number of states. I am not actually surprised that Senator Paul does not see those other folks, outside of Kentucky, as his cousins; his knowledge of genetics, like his knowledge of virology, leaves much to be desired. I doubt that he graduated at the top of his university or medical school classes. Alas!
I think Rand Paul is probably first cousin to a horse’s ass.