Today’s Gratitude

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller’s Tweet is worth considering, repeatedly:

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How many of these ancestors are there?  Well . . . just move up your family tree 20 generations and you will find more than one million great great great . . . grandparents.  And they all had to find each other and mate at the right time or else you wouldn’t be sitting there reading this.  This is one of the many cases where facts are more amazing than any fiction you could ever concoct.

I’ve long been fascinated by this thought experiment.  Imagine driving along the highway passing your chronologically arranged ancestors, all standing in a line.  What would that be like?  

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 4 Comments

  1. Avatar of Ruth Henriquez Lyon
    Ruth Henriquez Lyon

    I like to trace my family tree back to the first bacterium. Which means I have a really big family, and I am never alone on this planet.

    1. Avatar of Erich Vieth
      Erich Vieth

      Ruth: Doesn’t that put you into a moral quandary if a doctor tries to prescribe an antibiotic for you based on a bacterial infection?

  2. Avatar of Ruth Henriquez Lyon
    Ruth Henriquez Lyon

    Re: moral quandary. Good question, and thank you for posing it! It’s not exactly a quandary for me, but there is that little thing about existence being dependent on taking the life of other beings, whether it’s bacteria, plants, animals, or fungi.

    For me, part of spiritual practice is daily acknowledging my debt to all those who keep me alive, and having reverence for both the dark and the light aspects of the overall life process here on Earth. The ancient image of the circular serpent with its tail in its mouth (the Uroboros) is, for me, about this self-devouring cycle of life on the planet.

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