[ExI] digital resurrection of a genome

Adrian Tymes atymes at gmail.com
Fri Jul 3 02:13:46 UTC 2015


On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 6:41 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

>
> Suppose a guy is married three times and has at least a couple (but as
> many as four) girlfriends on the side, and it becomes apparent that he is
> the father of at least 25 children, 19 of whom were borne by women who were
> his wife at the time of the birth.  A century passes.  Thousands of people
> are his direct descendants, out of which dozens get DNA tested.  Those
> descendants do genealogy and find each other by various means, FTDNA,
> AncestryDNA, 23andMe, such as that.  They form a rollicking continuous
> online family reunion.
>
>
>
> In theory, with sufficient persistence and determination, those
> descendants could compare their genomes, look at the shared segments in
> FTDNA, and gradually reconstruct the entire genome of the long-perished
> prolific ancestor.
>
>
>
> Is there a flaw in my reasoning anywhere?
>

What happens if any of the guy's genes did not make it into anyone still
alive at the time of comparison?  (Most simply, one gene happening in all
25 cases to not make it into the fertilizing sperm.)
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