Incest at a Discreet Remove

Ever since I can remember I have been troubled by and very suspicious of the number of my ancestors, and of yours, too. Because if you keep doubling them back through each generation, you don't have to go far before you come up with some truly astronomical numbers. Of course I know that this means that there was a lot of duplication between your ancestors and mine. Still....

In the 26th chapter of his endlessly interesting book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything," published just last year, Bill Bryson attacked this problem, the first time I had seen or heard it dealt with outside of my own thoroughly boggled mind. He pointed out that--

"If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived."

And he goes on to say:

"Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that your line is not pure. You couldn't be here without a little incest -- actually quite a lot of incest -- albeit at a genetically discreet remove."

Ok. All right. Nevertheless, for me something still does not quite ring right.

It's been the sort of thing that has led me to wonder whether the answer is that the world and the whole of existence is just a figment of my imagination after all, and that when I'm gone for good, it will all vanish, too, in the same way that everything in a dream ceases to exist the moment that you awake.


All I know is that at this point it looks as if I will never get to see the Great Pyramids, or the Great Wall of China, or the great stuff in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, but if I ever do make it over, they had damn well better be there!