G4BB 98: Mucking Out the Stalls

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Mucking Out the Stalls

Dear G4BB: You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you? …from Society Slim and his faithful horse, Saddlesore

98.1  Dear Guys: Yup…busted! Enquiring minds, and all that, right? So here’s the thing: I got to thinking about the clumsy way in which Uncle Wiki defined “three-quarter siblings” for horses. They cited references from books, none of which could be found at my local library…altho one author’s name did pop up…M.E. Ensminger…”Doc E.” as he was called…who died in 1998 at age 90. He wrote 22 books on animal husbandry…horses, cows, sheep, fowl, you name it…and they did have a copy of his The Complete Encyclopedia Of Horses, A.S. Barnes & Co., 1977. Well, if that doesn’t qualify as an expert, I can’t image what would. Alongside it on the reference shelf was Summerhays Encyclopaedia for Horsemen, R.S. Summerhays & Stella A. Walker, Fredrick Warner, 1975.

98.2  So…2 prominent experts…books not blogs, real old-fashioned “dead tree” stuff. Can we settle this equine terminology business once and for all? (Spoiler: of course not, but still fun to try!) But first, to standardize my “Tentative System” (TS).

98.3  The letter designations I’d been using for various kinship relationships were assigned pretty much as they came up…”ad hoc”… so I decided to organize them as simply A, full siblings…B, three-quarter siblings…and C, half-siblings.  An X indicates an in blood relationship, which for full means sharing 4 grandparents but not the same 2 parents…and for three-quarter and half means  sharing a common sire, but different dams. i think it’s significant that I couldn’t find on the net a simple explanation, as opposed to examples, of the term “in blood.” Perhaps that’s because it really does mean different things in different contexts…but we’ll see what happens when the experts weigh in.

98.4  Chart 334 reorganizes and re-letters the different cases….shared grandparents are numbered in green.  What I have chosen to call “half-siblings in blood”…CX…are almost universally called by the same sire…the alternate terms sire-side siblings and half-siblings in blood together account for less than a dozen Google hits. Still, to me the symmetry was irresistible: fractional siblings are thru the mare…fractional siblings in blood are thru the sire…this really helps explain what’s going on, I think. Aaaaaaand they’re off!!!

98.5  Full Siblings…Both Ensminger and Summerhays define this as “having the same sire and dam.” Good start! Ensminger lists all of these “closer-than-1st cousin” relationships under the entry for “Brothers or Sisters” which he defines as “having the same parents or one parent in common.” This caught me off guard at first…I tend to think of “brothers” as meaning “full brothers”…not “full or half brothers”…thus “brothers” wouldn’t share just one parent, but his point of view is perfectly acceptable. Just different ways of looking at it…altho he will very soon contradict himself, as we shall see.

98.6  And BTW…Summerhays gives “own sibling” as a synonym for “full sibling.” I have so far purposely refrained from mentioning this term, as again there is  disagreement as to precisely what it means. Some horsy folks say it simply means “full.” Others attach the further meaning of “raised together”…as an “own” daughter raised with its mother, or “own siblings” raised together. The implication is that as much as a horse’s nature may come from its “blood,” many behavioral traits may be learned during its upbringing. So I’ll just mention that, for what it’s worth.

98.7   Half-Siblings…Summerhays says “same dam, different sires.” Ensminger agrees, and points out: “This is one of the most frequently misused terms.”  No kidding! And this was written, what, 35 years ago? It hasn’t gotten any better, has it? He dutifully uses by the same sire to mean “same sire, different dams” and goes on to say: “This distinction is for a definite purpose, for only a few horses can be [half-siblings] to a famous horse, but hundreds can be by the same sire.” That’s the story we’ve been hearing all along.

98.8  Summerhays does not address this “opposite” of half-siblings as Ensminger does, but so far, our experts are conforming pretty much to TS categories A, C, and CX.

98.9   Full Siblings in Blood…AX…which Ensminger calls simply “siblings in blood,” and Summerhays doesn’t address. But what Ensminger says is interesting: “By the same sire out of full sisters…or by full brothers out of the same dam”…that would be cases AX1 and AX2…but then he goes on to add: “or any combination of exactly the same blood.” That certainly sounds like another way of saying “all 4 grandparents are the same”…cases AX3 and AX4. Still, in these latter 2 cases, horses X and Y do not share even one parent…so “brothers in blood” would strictly speaking sometimes be “brothers” (AX1 and AX2) and sometimes not (AX3 and AX4.) Hate to to get picky, but words mean something…at least once upon a time… 😉 😉

98.10  So that’s a small contradiction on Ensminger’s part. Mind you, as important as having the same 4 grandparents appears to be, the concept still pre-dates modern genetic understanding, since “brothers in blood” who are brothers have a CR of 5/16, slightly more than “brothers in blood” who are non-brothers with 1/4 = 4/16.

98.11  Three-Quarter Siblings…Ensminger: “For example, horses having the same dams and whose sires have identical sires but different dams”…he is referencing case B2 only. And I am gritting my teeth…because he gives an example, instead of an explanation. Now strictly speaking, when you say “for example,” I take that to mean there are other examples…that the one you cited isn’t the only one. But is that what he intended? And if so, what are the other examples? Probably B1, since along with B2, horses X and Y are at the very least half-siblings…they have the same dam…altho they are more than that…”enhanced half-siblings” is the term used in human genealogy. But does he mean to also include non-half-sibling (i.e. by the same sire) cases BX1 and BX2? We simply don’t know. Grrrrrrrrr. And he doesn’t break it down any further…no mention of “three-quarter siblings in blood”…so we’re left hanging.

98.12  On the other hand, for “three-quarter siblings”…which he alternately calls “three parts siblings”…Summerhays says: “Same dam, sires who are half-brothers or by the same sire.”  So he is explicitly including both B1 and B2. No mention of the “in blood” versions, BX1 and BX2 so we simply don’t know where they belong. And that’s what our “experts” have to say. Is it any wonder, given the general “dumbing down” of the populace over the past 2 decades, that there appears today to be no consensus.

98.13  But wait for it…there is one final definition, from Ensminger…and dear friends, it’s a doozie! “Seven-eighth siblings: The progeny of a horse and his son produced by the same mare, or similar combinations of lineage.” Recall, many horsey folk refer to “skipping a generation on one side” as three-quarter siblings, in contrast to the “other” definition, that of 3 common grandparents. Presumably, “similar combinations” would encompass “the progeny of a horse and her daughter by the same sire.” Trouble is, yet again, we simply don’t know what exactly he has in mind…

98.14  …and what’s more, in such a case, as you can see in Chart 345, there is no way that 7 of 8 great grandparents are shared by horses X and Y…4 ancestors are shared as great grandparents of both, and 2 other ancestors are shared grandparents of X and great grandparents of Y. That’s a total of 6 shared ancestors…is it possible that the fact that 2 of these ancestors are one generation closer to X than to Y somehow constitutes the equivalent of a “7th great grandparent”? I need a vacation…

98.15  But I know what you’re thinking…before I go on vacation, I ought to at least show you what real seven-eighth siblings look like…and you’re right…in for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.

98.16  This is taken from a catalog of bulls from last year…7 of the 8 great grandparent slots match…the only difference is at the bottom of each pedigree, Miss Lady versus Miss Nadine. And the bull Eaton’s Assert appears twice in each lineage…here’s how it looks in tree form…

98.17  FF = thru father’s father, FM = thru father’s mother, MF = thru mother’s father, MM = thru mother’s mother.  Eaton’s Assert is a great grandfather to both 70 and 71 in 2 different ways (thru cow LT A3 and thru bull LT A), so he counts as 2 of the 7 shared great grandparents…and these seven-eighth brothers are related how? Answer next week…

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Copyright © 2012 Mark John, All Rights Reserved

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G4BB 97: You Could Lose Your Mind!

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You Could Lose Your Mind!

Dear G4BB:  Thanksgiving has come and gone, and once again at our family gathering, the traditional arguments raged on…including the one about whether it’s really possible to have “identical cousins” like Patty and Cathy on “The Patty Duke Show.” Can you settle this, so I can be on the winning side for sure this Christmas?  …from Lambsie, in Pie City

97.1  Dear Lambsie: Be happy to…and BTW, the tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit, got that? But listen…did you take a Biology class in high school? Hey, there’s my old teacher…she was double-jointed and had a habit of leaning on her desk with her arms bending at all the wrong angles. Anyway, she taught us about phenotypes and genotypes…sound familiar? A phenotype consists of all the physically observable characteristics or traits of an organism. A genotype is the genetic make-up that makes the phenotype possible.

97.2  From the point of view of phenotype, is it possible for 2 people, not identical twins, to still be so similar in appearance that they could be mistaken for identical twins? Absolutely…and I’m sure we’ve all seen examples of that at one time or another. I once worked with a women whose teenage sons, separated in age by a couple of years, were to me indistinguishable. Then you have the Olsen girls, Mary-Kate and Ashley…the family says they’re fraternal twins, but they resemble each other to the point where they were both cast as Michelle Tanner on  “Full House” at age 9 months…such a shared role is usually filled by identicals. And in researching this topic, I came across a blogger who remembers 2 unrelated boys from high school who were able to convincingly play identical twins in a school play.

97.3   So between siblings on the one hand, and completely unrelated individuals on the other, it’s certainly possible for 1st cousins to look identical. On the show, Patty’s father Martin Lane and Cathy’s father Kenneth Lane were identical twins. For the record, in the unaired pilot, it was their mothers who were identical…this pilot was never broadcast because a different actor, Mark Miller, played Martin. On the show, it was William Schallert, and he also played his twin brother in several episodes, with a mustache. He even once played Martin impersonating Kenneth.

97.4  And in a second season episode (the show ran for 3 seasons), they took it one step further as Duke played yet a 3rd cousin, Betsy, from Chattanooga, with a Southern accent of course. And just for the heck of it, here’s a shout-out to the “4th cousin”…then teen actress Rita McLaughlin…she had been one of the kiddie helpers on “Watch Mr. Wizard,” and stood in for Patty Duke when one of the cousins was seen from the back. Under her married name of Rita Walker, she went on to a career in soaps on “The Secret Storm” and “As the World Turns.”

97.5  But I guess the producers of the show thought identical twin fathers was enough to justify the concept…identical mothers as well would have been even better. With identicals on both sides, the resulting girls would genealogically be double 1st cousins, who are normally are as closely related as half-siblings….but genetically they’d be as close as full siblings. Even so, the way they did it, with identical fathers and unrelated mothers, Patty and Cathy are as closely related as half-siblings…since genetically, their fathers can be considered the same person. So in the sense of appearance alone, “identical [1st] cousins” is a plausible idea…very unusual, but certainly possible in real life. Now in terms of genotype or DNA, it’s a different story altogether.

97.6   Since their mothers are unrelated, Patty and Cathy cannot have identical an genetic makeup, as would be the case with identical twins. Identical twins start at conception as one single fertilized egg…with one single set of genes. The egg then splits into 2, and both halves develop into separate individuals. These 2 identical twins have identical genes because there’s no way that they couldn’t have…the only source of their DNA was that one single fertilized egg and its genetic content. There is simply nowhere else “non-identical” genes could have come from.

97.7  Now to examine this a little further, the reason full siblings are different, both in appearance and in genes, is twofold. First of all…of the approximately 20,000 genes we have, we actually have a pair of each…one from each parent….for a total of 40,000. And to take the father as an example…of the paternal set of 20,000 genes that 2 brothers get, 10,000 will be the same, and 10,000 will be different…that’s because when the sperm cell that formed each brother was produced, its 20,000 genes were a random mix, half from the father’s father, and half from the father’s mother…because the father himself has 2 sets of 20,000 to start with. This “shuffling” of genes is the whole point behind sexual reproduction…each time the father has a child, he gives it a different combination of his genes.

97.8  When I said 10,000 match, 10,000 don’t, it’s never that exact…it’s always more or less, but it’s close, due to random probability. Could all 20,000 match? Well, imagine you and a friend flip coins 20,000 times and every time what you get a match, heads or tails. Ridiculously unlikely, but not absolutely impossible. And since Patty and Cathy’s fathers’ have the same genes…both pairs, all 40,000…let’s assume both girls get exactly the same 20,000 from their fathers. Huge assumption, I know, but play along…

97.9   Now the second way genes control what an individual will be is by the process of dominance. Remember, you have 2 complete sets of genes, one from each parent. So which genes will make you, you? Well, of every pair, one will be expressed, called the dominant gene…and one will be repressed, called recessive gene. Again, it will normally be 50/50, father’s genes versus mother’s genes. But it is not absolutely impossible that all 20,000 of the Lane genes could be dominant…so that effectively Patty and Cathy’s genetic makeup could functioning as if  they were truly identical twins. Just imagine you and your friend flipped coins 20,000 times and got identical results…and did that twice!…once to get identical genes from the fathers, and again so that only the fathers’ genes are expressed, not the mothers’.  That’s how likely it is…which is to say, not very…but that should keep the Yuletide argument going for a while, huh? 😉 😉

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97.10  Couple more from the wiseGeek “Cousins” page…and first-up sounds pretty confident…and confidence is a good thing, generally. In this case, they happen to be wrong, but I’m here…no harm done!

97.11  The trouble is, you reckon cousins from the CLOSEST common ancestor, not from ANY common ancestor. As shown in Chart 343, YOU and your cousin are indeed half-4th cousins…you have a 3G grandfather in common, but your 2G grandfathers are half-brothers, not full brothers, since they have different mothers…and thus you have different 3G grandmothers. All that you got right. But that’s as far as it goes…certainly, your 3G grandfather’s parents are 4G grandparents to both you and your cousin…but they are not your CLOSEST common ancestor…we’ve already established that your 3G grandfather is.

97.12  Using your line of reasoning, that cousins can be figured from ANY common ancestor…2 full siblings, with the same mother and father, would also be 1st cousins, since they have grandparents in common. They would also be 2nd cousins, with great grandparents in common, and 3rd, 4th, 5th cousins, on up the tree. That obviously isn’t right. Again, it’s the CLOSEST common ancestor that determines it…in the case of full siblings, that would be their parents, period…it stops right there.

97.13  And this next one is not a question but a declaration…it needs no response, except to say: whatever floats your boats, twin cousins. Funny how that ties in with Patty and Cathy…but also notice that you are “irregular double cousins,” different on each side…full 1st cousins since your mothers are sisters, but half-1st cousins since your fathers are only  half-brothers. Double 1st-cousins…that is, the same on both sides…have a CR of 1/4 = 4/16, equivalent to half-siblings. Yours is 3/16, just a bit less. But that’s pretty cool you 2 cousins and your dad being born on the same day. Do you look anything alike, I wonder? Next week…gee whiz, who forgot to close the barn door??? See yez then.

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Copyright © 2012 Mark John, All Rights Reserved

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Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podBean.com  and   http://thewholething.podBean.com

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at   http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com/2011/02/resume.html

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podBean.com

G4BB 96: …Rounding the Clubhouse Turn

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…Rounding the Clubhouse Turn

96.1  So here’s what happened…I was trolling the net researching the concept of “three- quarter siblings” when I stumbled across its use in the equine world. Seems among horsey people, it’s a common term, due to the fact that horses are neither monogamous nor bound by any inbreeding taboo. Which means what exactly? Which means that while half-siblings and “enhanced” half-siblings (where the unshared parents are themselves related) are relatively rare among humans, they are the rule among horses. Another way to put that…between a Coefficient of Relationship of ½ for siblings and 1/8 for 1st cousins, there are many more fractional gradations routinely produced in the horse world.

96.2  And reviewing from last week, one of the more striking conventions is that half-siblings must share the same mother or dam. By tradition, horses with the same father or sire, but different mothers, are not called half-siblings as they would be in the human world. They are simply called by the same sire. Based purely on biology, the fact that a horse can have a 1000 half-siblings thru its sire, but only a dozen or so thru its dam, supposedly accounts for this asymmetrical way of looking at it. A few scurrilous reformers want to change that, but the hobby resists. One interesting compromise…yet to catch on, but definitely out there…is to call half-siblings thru a sire sire-side siblings. This terminology is intended to suggest that while such “siblings” are not full-fledged half-siblings, they’re siblings of some sort nonetheless.

96.3  Chart 340 collects some typical kinship arrangements between horses X and Y…because of the maternal half-sibling rule, sharing a mother as opposed to a father makes it a difference case, as does the fathers and/or mothers sharing the same fathers or mothers.

96.4  What I did next was to find what looked like a reasonable set of definitions…then compared them to Uncle Wiki and found discrepancies. I located 4 more sources, pretty much in the order that Google gave them to me. Most hits were sites that were using the terms, not defining them. And some sets of definitions were duplications, taken directly from Wikipedia, word for word, as will happen. Chart 339 summarizes the jumble of conflicting meanings. Mind you, I was an outsider looking in, justing wanting to see how it was done…I hardly could have expected such a lack of consensus.

96.5  And just for the fun of it, Chart 341 replaces the lettered examples with their CR…and as you can see, these terms date back to before the genetics of horse breeding was understood in the modern mathematical sense.

96.6   So to what do we attribute this confusing jumble? Poor communication skills? I’m sure that’s part of it. Maybe in some cases, if you were to take a definition and say: OK, here’s a relationship that isn’t included in the definition the way you stated it, did you want it to be? They might say: Yes, I did…I guess I didn’t state it as precisely as I should have. In other words, what they said wasn’t exactly or completely what they meant. But you must remember that such terms as siblings in blood and three-quarter siblings are routinely used in horsey talk, and the assumption must be that the reader or listener understands what’s being described, nez pah? Otherwise, what’s the point?

96.7  And actually, the deeper point is this: Most of the definitions I found were along the lines of “sires are this, dams are that, etc. etc.” Is there something more fundamental behind that way of putting it, some underlying principle that isn’t being squarely elucidated? I think there is…and it comes from what I called Source 4…

96.8  Siblings in blood have the same 4 grandparents…aha, now we’re getting somewhere…this is what I meant by an underlying principle. This definition applies to cases A and D…one parent the same, other parents siblings…and also to case I…both parents are siblings to the other parents. In all 3 cases, X and Y share 4 grandparents. Now if they shared 4 grandparents because they had the same father and mother, they’d be just siblings…but because there are more than 2 “middlemen” (more than one father and one mother) between them and the “blood” of their grandparents, they are siblings in blood.

96.9   Since we’ve introduced the concept of shared grandparents, we might then make the leap to this: three-quarter siblings share 3 out of 4 grandparents. Positively tantalizing, isn’t it? Could it be just that simple? Well, I believe that from a certain point of view, it is…I have found references to three-eighths, five-eighths, and seven-eighths siblings, referring to shared great grandparents…sometimes in the same breath as three-quarter siblings. So it’s clear that this is what some horsey folk are driving at when they use these terms.

96.10  Doing it this way, B, C, E, and F…where one parent is shared, and the other parents are either half-siblings or sire-side siblings…and cases G and H…where there’s a skipping of a generation on one side…could be lumped together. As in Chart 339 all these cases are some sort of three-quarter siblings, at least according to somebody.  Yes, I know…in cases G and H, X and Y don’t actually share 3 grandparents…I’ve marked them in Chart 342…they would if X’s sire were his grandsire…but perhaps being his sire is even better than being his grandsire, in the sense of being more closely related…??? And yes, if we were doing it strictly genetically, then A and D would be grouped together with G and H…lo and behold, that’s how Source 5 alone does it.

96.11  Again, this terminology pre-dates modern genetics, so maybe it will change sometime in the future. But let’s take a stab at how it’s done today…

96.12  We’ll call this the Tentative System (TS)…and granted, it sure makes logical sense…altho that might not be enough, right? BTW, we haven’t yet seen the term half-siblings in blood…which would presumably be still another way of saying by the same sire or sire-side siblings. I Googled it, and got 3…yes 3!…hits. But one was satisfyingly to the point…

96.13  The colts in question, Bertie and Elmo, have the same sire, out of different dams…they are not half-siblings, since they don’t have the same dam…but the way this horsey person looks at it, they are a kind of half-siblings…half-siblings in blood. And Google found me 2 other people in the world who have the temerity to put it that way.

96.14  But is it possible that TS is in fact the way horsey people think, and that as a breed (sorry!!) they simply lack the ability to communicate it as succinctly as this? Good question…let’s take a closer look at exactly what Uncle Wiki says about three-quarter siblings…

96.15  Even before we get to comparisons with TS, there’s a lot here that doesn’t add up. “(Maternal) half-brothers” doesn’t make sense…there is no other kind of half-brothers…”(paternal) half-brothers” don’t exist. And why does the third definition, that of three-quarter genetic siblings, say “put simply, horses that share three grandparents”? That applies to the other 2 definitions as well. Was the “put simply” part meant to apply to all 3 definitions? Well, there you have your poor communication skills…there’s really no way to tell what the heck they intended.

96.16  But now look at B, C, E, and F…in B, horses X and Y are half-siblings (same dam) and their sires are half-siblings…in C, X and Y are half-siblings (same dam) and their sires are sire-side siblings or by the same sire.  In both cases, they are half-siblings and share 3 grandparents, so TS groups them together as three-quarter siblings. B qualifies with Uncle Wiki, but not C…perhaps because there are 2 half-sibling relationships with B…dams and paternal granddams…but only one with C?

96.17  Similarly, in E…X and Y are sire-side siblings, and their dams are half-siblings…where F has sire-side siblings whose dams are also sire-side siblings…no half-siblings involved at all in F. So for Uncle Wiki, E gets the nod as three-quarter siblings in blood, but not F. Still, they think F should be something, so we get three-quarter genetic siblings. For the record, I got a minuscule number of Google hits on that non-traditional terminology…”three-quarter genetic brothers” 123 hits…”three-quarter genetic sisters” 1 hit…”three-quarter genetic siblings” 0 hits…”three-quarter genetic relatives” 19 hits.

96.18   But more importantly, while F, involving NO half-siblings at all, gets a definition…C, which includes half-siblings at least thru the mother’s generation does not…and arguably C is more significant than even E, which includes half-siblings only thru the grandmother’s generation…and E does get a definition. See what I mean? Something just doesn’t jibe with Uncle Wiki…and the sources they site are books, not websites, so I haven’t been able to check them. Looks like another case of taking Uncle Wiki with a good lick from the salt block, sez me…

96.19  And of course, Uncle Wiki includes cases G and H in its definitions, where a generation is skipped on one side…horse X’s parent is Y’s grandparent. I didn’t include them in TS simply because they don’t follow the shared grandparents scheme…altho as we’ve seen, X and Y do share 3 ancestors…2 as grandparents…and 1 as parent of one and grandparent of the other…presumably this is even “better” than sharing 3 grandparents. Except that genetically…thus genealogically…”better” means “different,” and precision demands you distinguish between these cases. It looks like horsey folk have a dual system going on with three-quarter siblings…it could mean 3 shared grandparents, or it could mean parents who are father/son or mother/daughter…skipping a generation on one side. Two different things, called the same thing…and it appears this ambiguity is something they’re willing to live with.

96.20  But to take this race down the home stretch and to the wire…I found a very interesting discussion on the net about just these issues…yes, people in the hobby are aware of them…and I have drawn from it 4 comments which I think will be enlightening…

96.20  Comment A…on three-quarter siblings, agrees with Source 6 and TS…on three-quarter siblings in blood, agrees with Uncle Wiki…and almost with TS…I say E and F, they say E and H…did they mean to exclude C and G? Dunno…

96.21  Comment B…Wow! Hold the presses! Magic Millions and Inglis are big-time horse-traders in Australia, and the suggestion here is that what one of them would correctly call half-siblings, the other will bump up to three-quarter siblings, “to make pedigrees look much better.” When I said “poor communication skills,” I was trying to give the benefit of a doubt…but here, they’re talking “fraud”…gotta love it!

96.22  Comment C…Kind of agrees and disagrees…kinda. Notice “open to interpretation” and “that’s how it used to be.”

96.23  And finally Comment D…which in the first sentence re-states the traditional idea that siblings of both the half and three-quarter variety MUST have the same dam…and in the second, suggests the more modern, genetically-based approach. And there it is in a nutshell…old or new?…”blood” or genes?

96.24  Bottom line: there is a more-or-less standard way to describe equine kinship, and it seems as if TS gets very close to that. But some people get sloppy…or are just plain ignorant…or aim to misrepresent…or are reformers with an axe to grind. And as with human kinship, sometimes horsey folk simply learn slightly different classifications.  At least that’s what this outsider sees when he’s looking in. Welcome to life! Mail-bag next week…and does a hot dog make YOU lose control? … 😉 😉

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Copyright © 2012 Mark John, All Rights Reserved

shameless plugs…or as they said in Macbeth, out damsire!

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podBean.com  and   http://thewholething.podBean.com

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com/2011/02/resume.html

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podBean.com

G4BB 95: Horsing Around

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Horsing Around

95.1  Imagine a world where the average woman had 10 children over her lifetime…and the average man had over a 1000. What sort of kinship relationships and terminology would develop? For human beings, this would go way beyond plural marriages or even harem. Fortunately, we’re not talking about people, but about horses.

95.2  Among horse breeders, equine kinship consists of a mix of “human” terms and those particular to the field. I’m sure you’ve heard some of the basic ones…a male horse is a stallion, a female is a mare. When young, they are colt and filly. If you’re a horse, your father is your sire…your mother is your dam. Sons and daughters are…well, sons and daughters…altho the overall offspring of a male is his get…of a female, her produce. 

95.3  I thought it would be fun today to compare and contrast human and horsey (their word) systems of kinship, but with this caveat: Altho these terms are ingrained over hundreds of years of use, they are by no means absolutely universal. Fanciers of different breeds look at things in slightly different ways…and indeed what we’ll be talking about today pertains most specifically to thoroughbreds. After all, their stud book dates back to 1751, 46 years before the recording of human births and deaths was required by British law…which should tell you something abut how serious they took their horses!

95.4  What’s more, while the nomenclature and the thinking behind it pre-dates scientific concepts of inheritance, there is a small but vocal cadre of nudniks who believe traditional terms should be adjusted to reflect modern genetic principals. Most in the hobby are perfectly happy with the traditional system, but there is occasional agitation…even so, some terms are used by different individuals in different ways…sort of like: Well that’s how I was always told is was supposed to be done. As an outsider looking in, I am left with a somewhat confusing overall picture. Not that much different from human kinship, nez pah?

95.5  Chart 336 shows the pedigree for a horse named Asterisk. Its father’s entire family is called his sire line…its mother’s, his distaff line. Some of its ancestors are marked with an *, and this indicates what’s called the tail male line and the tail female line…that is, the the male line thru the sire and the female line thru the dam. Members of the tail female line are often called 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. dams. Less frequently, members of the tail male line are 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. sires. The other special term indicated is Asterisk’s maternal grandfather, who is called a damsire or broodmare sire.

95.6  There is no problem with mating horses that are related to each other…in fact, inbreeding as a description generally only applies out to 3 generations…altho some would say as many as 5. Since horses don’t have last names, the most compact way to refer to one is: “by Sire, out of Dam, by Damsire.” A horse is properly BY its sire and OUT OF its dam…the surest way to announce you’re a newbie is to say “out of Sire.” Obviously, this system is tilted towards the males…traditionally, it was thought that the male blood contributed more than the female. Why don’t you also mention the sire’s sire? Because if you’re talking about a particular male horse, you probably already know…seriously, that’s how they think of it. The entire pedigree is important of course, but this shorthand refers to the 3 most important ancestors: father, mother, and paternal grandfather. Its similar to the Spanish custom of double surnames…a combination of your father’s last name and your mother’s maiden name, which of course is her father’s last name, indicating her paternal line.

95.7   Because horses don’t get married, and can be bred to relatives both close and remote, the occurrence of individuals who are less closely related than full siblings, but more closely related than full 1st cousins, is much more prevalent than with humans. Human half-siblings, with CR of 1/4, are what you’ll most likely encounter falling in between full siblings (½) and full 1st cousins (1/8). True, with the breakdown of the traditional family unit, half-siblings are becoming more common…to the point where where the term “quarter siblings” has evolved to describe unrelated half-siblings “on the other side.” But in human kinship, “enhanced half-siblings” are unusual…that is, half-siblings related thru both paternal and maternal lines…not so in the equine sphere, where they are the frequent and of course intentional. Here are some basic definitions I plucked from the internet to get us started…

95.8  Chart 337 diagrams the first 2 definitions. The important thing to notice is that half brothers occur thru the dam only…on the other hand, what in human terms would be half-brothers sharing the same father are in horsey terms called by the same sire. They are not thought of as being “related,” at least to the extent that they cannot be described as “brothers.” This odd dichotomy is the result of the fact that a horse can have a dozen half-siblings thru its mother, but a 1000 or more thru its father. Thus, having a common sire is considered of less significance, at least as far as the terminology is concerned. As the old joke goes: Your horse is a grand nephew of Secretariat? Him and 5000 others…

95.9  Obviously 2 horses with the same sire are related in a genetic sense, and a few cranky reformers insist they too should be called half-brothers. The rest of the fraternity ignores them. As with language in general, it’s just a case of making oneself clearly understood…using the terms in a different, “better” way is going to get you in trouble, pure and simple. But what’s shown in Chart 337 is considered standard.

95.10   Chart 338 takes the “half sibling” (A–C) and “by the same sire” (D–F) cases back a generation. In human terms, all these would be called “enhanced half-siblings”…A and D would be “3/4 siblings,” half-siblings on one side, 1st cousins on the other, for a total Coefficient of Relationship of 3/8. The others would be half-siblings and half-1st cousins, a CR of 5/16. But what are they in horse terms…can we match these 6 cases to the definitions we are examining?

95.11  Well, the definition of brothers in blood fits D (same sire, dams full sisters) and A (same dam, sires full brothers.) The definition of three-quarter brothers fits only C (same dam, sires by same sire.) Presumably, B would be nothing beyond half brothers (same dam)…E and F would simply be by the same sire. But does this nomenclature hold across the board? Sadly, no. For example…

95.12  …let’s take Uncle Wiki…thankfully, they agree on the definitions of full siblings, half siblings, and by the same sire. They also concur on brothers in blood. But then all hell breaks loose. Their definition of three-quarter brothers fits B, not C…same dam, sires are half brothers (i.e. sires have the same dam, different sires.) But they go on to say that three-quarter brothers can also mean same dam, sires who are father and son…as shown at left as G. Whoa…didn’t see that coming…but there’s more.  

95.13  Uncle Wiki defines three-quarter brothers in blood
as the flip side of three-quarter brothers…that is, either same sire, dams that are half-sisters (i.e. dams have the same dam, different sires), which would be E…or same sire, dams who are mother and daughter…shown at right as H. Then there’s three-quarter genetic brothers…and that would be same sire, same damsire (i.e. dams have the same sire) and that gives us F. Notice that “dams have the same sire” presumably implies “but different dams,” otherwise we’d also be defining D, which they’ve already called brothers in blood.

95.14  Notice too that C, the only thing that our original definitions labeled as three-quarter brothers, has fallen thru Uncle Wiki’s cracks…it falls under no definition of three-quarters, and so is presumably nothing more than half-brothers. Quite a mess, no? And I’m sorry to say, it gets worse…Chart 339 summarizes our original definitions, Uncle Wiki’s…plus the style book for an organization called American Horse Publications, and 3 more sources off the net. A double dash “–” means the term was not defined.

95.15  Under Source 4, I and J are marked with an asterisk since we haven’t seen them yet. Below, I is what in human terms are called double 1st cousins…the parents’ generation is colored orange and green because they can be either a same-sex pair of siblings or one of opposite sexes. And J in human terms is an irregular double cousin relationship…full 1st cousins thru the dams who are full sisters, and half-1st cousins thru the sires, who are half-brothers (i.e. same dam, different sires)…presumably it wouldn’t count if the sires were by the same sire (i.e. same sire, different dams.)

95.16  Like I said, quite a mess…for three-quarter brothers, not one of our 6 sources agrees. Uncle Wiki and Source 4 label B and E exactly opposite. G and H are considered either the same thing or 2 different things. At least brothers in blood and three-quarter brothers are 2 different things, right? Nope…Source 5 groups them together.

95.17  And the thing to keep in mind is: these terms are used routinely by horsey folk to describe various pedigrees, and they clearly mean something by them, and expect the reader will know what that something is. As sometimes happens, one column has grown into two…so next week I’ll take a stab at sorting it all out…till then, Hi-Yo G4BB, awaaaaay!…

Wicked Ballsy

So anyhow, here are 4  horses of a different color…top right is an especially dark “silver dapple”…bottom left is a “brindle”…you usually see that in dogs…top left and bottom right look to be “chimeras”…individuals with 2 different sets of DNA…like those cats you see whose faces are 2 different colors, split down the middle…

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Copyright © 2012 Mark John, All Rights Reserved

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G4BB 94: As the Quarter-What-Again? Turns…

!!!   check out the best $5 you ever spent...RELATED HOW AGAIN?   !!!

As the Quarter-What-Again? Turns…

Dear G4BB: I’m sort of an off-and-on fan of the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.” Several years ago I tried to do a family tree but gave up. But I did print out something about “quarter” cousins and siblings…can you make any sense of it?  …from Laura, in Luketown 

94.1  Dear Laura: Ah, yes…somebody who never throws anything out…welcome to the club! The trouble with soap genealogies, apart from their bewildering complexity, is that they can change at the whim of the writers. Stuff like: A, who everybody (both viewers and characters on the show) thought was the child of B and C, turns out to be the child of B and D…or X and Y…or who knows who. I can’t find what you printed out to double check it…it’s long gone off the net it seems…but I did find 2 extensive charts at the Brady Family entry at Uncle Wiki…they needed 2 because it was so intertwined.

94.2  What I have done in Chart 334 is pull out the relevant parties, move them around to where they make sense, and change a couple of last names to maiden names. We’ll examine the claims you found based on this information…altho as we shall see, it is apparently not the whole story…big surprise!

94.3  Now the generation in question I have marked with solid blue squares…and their relationships depend on 3 members of the preceding generation, in solid red squares. The reds are pretty straightforward: Roman and Bo are half-brothers, as Caroline is their mother, and they have different fathers. Roman and John Black are 1st cousins, as their parents Colleen and Shawn are siblings. Bo and John Black are not related at all.

94.4  As to the blue generation, the first thing to notice is that left to right among their parents there is a massive half-sibling “tag team” deal going on…from Anna to Roman to Marlena to John Black to Isabella. Thus among the 4 blues…Carrie, Eric/Sami (full sibs), Belle, and Brady…each is a half-sibling to the ones directly to the left or right…and a quarter-sibling skipping one…thus Carrie and Belle are quarters, Eric/Sami and Brady are quarters. And all that checks with the second line of your info.

94.5  Normally, quarter-siblings aren’t related to each other…both are simply related, as half-saiblings, to someone else. But as can happen, these 2 sets of quarter-siblings are also 2nd cousins, since their fathers Roman and John Black are 1st cousins. Likewise, the 2 on the ends, Carrie and Brady, are also 2nd cousins for the same reason, but not fractional siblings of any kind since they’re too widely separated. Belle and Eric/Sami are also 2nd cousins, besides being half-siblings.

94.6   As to the first line of your info, it’s completely wrong, all of it. Belle and Brady are half-siblings, not quarter-cousins. As for Shawn-D, he is a half-1st cousin to Carrie and Eric/Sami, since their fathers are half-brothers…but he is of no relation to Brady (not half-cousin) and no relation to Belle (not quarter-cousin.) In fact, on the show Shawn-D and Belle had a child! That would be kosher for quarter-sibs who are by definition not related, certainly not for quarter-cousins…who are presumed to be related somehow.

94.7  This is all based of course on the Uncle Wiki trees…but there are 2 further complications, one small and one big, not shown on their charts. The small complication is the fact that Bo was raised as Shawn’s son, and thus as Roman’s full brother, altho unbeknownst to all he had the same mother but a different father…so Bo and Roman were not full brothers but half-brothers. But assuming Bo and Roman were full brothers, as everyone thought, that would make Bo and John Black 1st cousins, and their children Shawn-D and Brady 2nd cousins…which, if you’re using terminology that includes quarter-cousins, could mean they were “half-cousins.” Perhaps that’s what your info is saying. But that still doesn’t help with Belle…she is now 2nd cousin or “half-cousin” to Shawn-D (but still not quarter-cousin) and still half-sibling to Brady (not quarter-cousin.) So there’s that.

94.8  The big complication is another website I found here…dating back over 10 years, mind you…which  includes a very extensive DOOL genealogy, in text form as opposed to chart. And they say that Isabella Toscano, Brady’s mother, is in fact the daughter of Victor Kiriakis…who is Bo’s father…altho not thru Bo’s mother Caroline! And that gives us a whole new set of claims to evaluate, below in Chart 334A…

94.9  And sure enough, Shawn-D and Brady now are half-cousins (well, half-1st cousins) since their parents Isabella and Bo are half-siblings…so your original information is now correct. As to Belle is a quarter cousin…I still don’t see it…unless they mean “Your half-cousin’s half-sibling is your quarter-cousin”…and Belle and Brady are half-siblings. But notice also that Belle and Shawn-D are still not blood relatives in any way…now “quarter-cousin” is being used in the same sense as “quarter-sibling”…implying there’s a connection, but not by blood, but only by serial marriages. I’m not saying it’s right, but such an interpretation at least makes some sense….because from Shawn-D’s point of view, Belle is on the “other side” of his half-cousin Brady’s family.

94.10  What else do we have…Bo is John’s half-brother-in-law. That’s correct as far as it goes…hard to imagine someone in real life saying “Well, he’s only my half-brother-in-law”  but it’s possible. Bo is Brady’s half-uncle.  OK, that’s fine…since Bo is Brady’s mother’s half-brother. …and Belle’s quarter-uncle.  Yikes…and what’s next, quarter-father?  I suppose that’s logical in the sense that your quarter-cousin’s father would be your quarter-uncle…I suppose…but please don’t quote me. John is Shawn-D’s half-uncle also. Well, no…here we must put our foot down…John Black is married to Shawn-D’s half-aunt, his father’s half-sister. And the fact that John Black is also Belle’s father probably plays into this line of thinking somehow, but my head is starting to hurt, you know?

94.11  And that final line about Belle’s half- and quarter-sisterhood is correct, quarter-uncles notwithstanding. Anyway, interesting real-world….sorry, fake-world entanglements, nez pah?

Hey G4BB: Back in 91.3…love that indexing!…you were talking about the diagram for double half-1st cousins…and how without lines of descent crossing each other, you couldn’t put individuals of the same generation on the same horizontal line…because then you’d have to go, as you put it, “up and over.” I tried drawing it that way and don’t see what’s so wrong with it.  …from Pythagoria, in Octagon City

94.12  Hey back atcha, Pythy…is that what they call you? Yeah, that’s a pretty clever little diagram, I have to admit. To get everybody else caught up, in Chart 355,  A represents double half-1st cousins with no lines of descent crossing over…B shows everyone of the same generation on the same horizontal line, with the descent from mother A to daughter Z crossing other lines.

94.13  Now what I was thinking of when I wrote “up and over” is what’s shown in C…without those green arrows, it looks like A and Z are siblings, descended from someone above them…since these lines are presumed to proceed top to bottom, ancestor to descendent. In other words, “up and over” would make you think the relationships were what’s shown in D, which they aren’t. Personally, I’m gonna stick with crossed lines, if it’s all the same to you…a few don’t hurt, altho it could start to look like string-art, couldn’t it? But since I went to the bother of drawing it, here’s a pop quiz…in D, how has the relationship between X and Y changed? Next week, a real change of pace…or is that trot?…as we horse around some. À bientôt. 

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Copyright © 2012 Mark John, All Rights Reserved

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Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podBean.com  and   http://thewholething.podBean.com

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com/2011/02/resume.html

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I’ll Tell Ya for $5 !!!!

Dear friends: Here’s the ad I put up on eBay classified today…

How are you and your grandmother’s cousin’s granddaughter related? If you have a PayPal account, I’ll tell you for $5. Yup, 5 bucks to finally know for sure…or confirm what you always thought. What’s $5…a bag of chips or a pack of smokes…almost a gallon of gas! Can you trust my answer? Do I know what I’m talking about? See for yourself…google G4BB (stands for Genealogy for Baby Boomers) and check out over 90 fun-filled posts. Here’s a sample of what you get…a color chart and a complete explanation emailed to you. And I’ll answer follow-up questions for free if there’s something you don’t understand. Send your question to stolfwx@hotmail.com, which is also my PayPal address.

Yup…this means YOU…$5 and I’ll sort it out for you…of course, you might find your answer somewhere here in my 90+ G4BB postings, but then sometimes even I can’t find something I’m looking for 😉 😉  So loosen those purse-strings and then at the next family reunion, you can prove them all wrong…ha ha!!

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Copyright © 2012 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

G4BB 93: Polly-tix-ical Pow Wow

 

Polly-tix-ical Pow Wow

Dear G4BB: Now that Elizabeth “Fauxcahontus” Warren has dislodged Scott Brown from the Teddy Kennedy Senate seat in Taxachusetts…what’s the dang deal? Is she an Indian or isn’t she? …from Princess Fryingpanbottlewasher, in Pioneer Village

93.1  Dear Prinny: Colorful, the way you put it…very colorful. BTW, I remember you from the Howdy Doody show, as the rival of Princess Summerfallwinterspring. Say hello to Dandy Doody and Elephant Bob for me. But for those of you who missed all the hubbub, Bub, here’s a thumbnail sketch…

93.2  Elizabeth “Betsy” Herring was born in Oklahoma City in 1949. Growing up, and all thru grade school and high school, she was white. At college and law school, she was white. As a law professor at various institutions, thru the 70s and 80s, she was white. Then from 1985-1996, we was listed as Native American in various professorial directories. The Spring 1993 Harvard’s Women’s Law Journal went so far as to include her in a list of “women of color.” As late as 1996, a Harvard Law School spokesman was quoted as saying that their faculty of 71 included several blacks and Hispanics, 11 women, and one Native American…her. The Harvard Crimson touted her as the first minority woman to receive tenure there…altho today, all parties concerned say her purported ethnicity played no part in her initial employment and subsequent advancement. At some point thereafter, she went back to being white, and is to this day.

93.3  The obvious question is: how can this happen? Her political opponents branded her a bald-faced liar, who used her supposed heritage to further her academic career. Warren has admitted that there is no documentation as to her Indian roots…it was just “family history” that was told to her as she was growing up. The story was that grandpa Harry Reed and grandma Hannie Crawford had Delaware and Cherokee blood respectively…and this was such a bone of contention in their families that they had to elope to get hitched.

93.4  Chart 332 is her family tree. One Cherokee genealogist says that no-one in this tree was ever listed on any Federal census as anything but white…and none appears on any Tribal roll. That’s pretty much what “no documentation” means, you see. For herself, Warren has provided very few specifics…how much, if any, Indian blood did her grandparents pass on to her? I get the feeling even she doesn’t really know, “high cheek-bones” or no. She defended her listing as a minority as her wanting to “connect with people for whom this heritage is part of their hearts.”

93.5  And in the interest of full disclosure, I am one of those people. But then, a lot of us are. Growing up, there was talk from my French Canadian maternal grandfather that there was “an Indian in the family.” The likely candidate is his paternal grandmother’s father…that would be my 3G grandfather, giving me a 1/32 share, far too little to be granted official tribal membership. But so far no confirmation, no documentation…sadly, not even a name, as my grandfather’s grandmother’s birth is recorded as “illegitimate”…father unknown.

93.6  But to answer your question, I judge this whole deal to be a proverbial tempest in a teapot. What Brown’s camp called a “lie” was really just an exaggeration, pretty much what you’d expect in those first giddy days of the diversity fad. Yes, an exaggeration…I mean, my grandparents were born in Italy, Poland, and Quebec…yet I cannot say I am an Italian, a Pole, a French Canadian…nor certainly an Indian. I am an American, simply that…I was born here, what can I say? I have multi-ethnic heritage…but short of saying “Sure I cry at weddings, all Italian men do,” that’s as far as it can reasonably go.

93.7  The trouble is that the concept of “lying” has been dumbed down to the point where almost anything can be called that. For example, you state that you never took piano lessons. Then you later remember that for several months in the 3rd grade…50 years ago mind you…you did, but hated practicing so much your parents let you stop. So what you said at first was a “lie,” right? No, not right. Like I said, mountain out of a molehill.

93.8  But before we leave this, I’d like to make 2 comments about Chart 332. When the controversy first erupted in April of this year, the New England Historic [sic] Genealogical Society announced at least one instance of possible documentation, altho they later backtracked, since no actual document ever turned up. It was a supposed marriage application on which one William J. Crawford stated that his mother was a Cherokee. On Chart 332, he would be the younger brother of Preston H. Crawford…and it is interesting to note that at that time, the early 1800s, and depending on the prevailing local attitudes, it was not uncommon for someone to claim Indian heritage as a cover for what was actually black ancestry. I’m just sayin’…”of color,” get it?

93.9  And from a purely genealogical standpoint, an interesting article was written by Sally Jacobs in the Boston Globe in September…here. Among professional…and serious amateur…genealogists, the danger of substituting “family lore” for actual documentation is well known and warned against. And this article is from the angle of what other relatives knew or thought they did. But what I especially liked was that Ms. Jacobs got all the kinship connections correct, as far as I could tell. For example, the granddaughter of Everett Reed and Laura Crawford is called Warren’s 2nd cousin…completely correct.

93.10  She even points out, without actually using the word “double,” that the two women are more related than ordinary 2nd cousins…owing to the fact that 2 Reed brothers married 2 Crawford sisters.  Another relative, Robert C. Boraker, is called Warren’s 4th cousin since their great great grandfathers were brothers…again, precisely right. My point is, this stuff isn’t really that difficult…just a little thought, and you can’t go wrong…sez me.

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93.11  The latest from the wiseGeek “Cousins” page…and the Rule of G’s…

93.12  Count the G’s to determine cousins. If the numbers are the same, you are simply cousins. Same Grandparents = 1 G = 1st cousins…same Great Grandparents = 2 G’s = 2nd cousins…same Great Great Grandparents = 3 G’s = 3rd cousins, etc. If the numbers are different, the lower one indicates cousins, and the difference between the 2 numbers is the times removed. So in your case, 3 G’s versus 4 G’s…that’s 3rd cousins once removed. Next week, we’ll see if we can soft soap ya…

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Copyright © 2012 Mark John, All Rights Reserved

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Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podBean.com  and   http://thewholething.podBean.com

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1615157918836241443#editor/target=post;postID=6823903869203297907

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podBean.com

G4BB 92: Stump the Band

Stump the Band

Dear G4BB: I understand that 2 people can be related only by a fraction which has a power of 2 in the bottom [denominator –ed.]…like 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.  But given that restriction, is ANY fraction less than 1 possible?  …from Matthew Matics Jr. in Space City

92.1  Dear Matt: Off the top of my head, I would say yes. Now granted…”yes” is not a rigorous mathematical proof. I suspect one exists. But maybe not…and if you could show me how it is impossible, say, for 2 people to be 177/512 related, then that would settle it too. But to demonstrate the types of permutations you’d need, I thought I’d sketch out everything from 1/32 to 15/32. 16/32 is of course ½, which is parent/child or brother/sister. Greater than that requires interbreeding…that is, you’d need at least one individual whose parents were related to each other in some way. That would take you from 17/32 up to 31/32…identical twins have the same genetic makeup, so are considered the same person…related by 32/32 or 1.

92.2  I figured this assignment would be tricky but do-able. Then I ran in to a brick wall. Now the cool thing about blogging…as opposed to “dead tree” publishing, like books, magazines, or newspapers…is that if you’re not sure about something, you can still go ahead. No one wants to read a book whose premise is “I have no idea.” But anything goes on the net, and who knows, maybe the answer is out there, and I’d be gratified to hear about it. Or maybe I’ll find the answer myself anyway. But today’s blog is the proverbial “work in progress.”

92.3  So let’s dive right in. 1, 2, 4, and 8 are easily taken care of, in Chart 321. The others will be compounds of these basic relationships…because you and I can be related one way thru our fathers, and another way thru our mothers, and our total CR is the numerical addition of those 2 ways.

Chart 322 outlines what we need, and it looks on the surface to be pretty straightforward.

92.4  The first 3 run pretty much to form, as in Chart 323…father’s side + mother’s side. 7/32 is a little trickier…adding 3 numbers suggests 3 sides? Well, no, 3 lines…and we’ll get to that in a bit.  

92.5  Chart 324 gives you the simplest 8’s…notice on the father’s side, X and Y have the same father, thus they are half-siblings, with a CR of 1/4, which is 8/32.

92.6  And Chart 325 extends that idea, converting the mothers’ side into 2 lines…the mothers of X and Y are half-siblings thru their fathers, 1st cousins thru their mothers.

92.7  Chart 326 sums up what we have so far. Find 13, 14, and 15 and we’re done.

92.8  Only now there’s a problem. Let’s analyze how we got 11…we added 8+2+1…translated, X and Y are related by 1/4 or 8/32 on their fathers’ side…X and Y are half-siblings. So far so good. Now X and Y’s mothers are half-siblings thru their fathers, 1/4 or 8/32…and 1st cousins thru their mothers, 1/8 or 4/32. Since X and Y’s mothers’ are half-siblings, X and Y are half-1st cousins…1/16 or 2/32. And since X and Y’s mothers are 1st cousins, X and Y are 2nd cousins…1/32. So that’s 2/32 + 1/32 = 3/32 from their mothers’ side, 8/32 from their fathers’ side, total 11/32. It checks.

92.9  Remember from last week: when 2 people who are related have offspring, the offspring are related to each other by 1/4 the relationship of their parents. And that’s just what happened here…as both half-siblings and 1st cousins, X and Y’s mothers have a total CR of 8/32 + 4/32 = 12/32. And 12/32 divided by 4 gives 3/32…and that’s the CR X and Y get from their mothers’ side.

92.10  Now try applying that to 13 = 8+4+1…the CR that X and Y get from their mothers’ side must be 5/32, so their mothers must be related by 4 times that or 20/32. Well, if the mothers were both siblings, 16/32…and 1st cousins, 4/32…that’s 20/32…divided by 4, gives you 5/32. But can you think of a way, without interbreeding, that the mothers of X and Y can be both siblings and 1st cousins? I can’t. I tried…and I just don’t see it. I’m stuck. Then for 14 = 8+4+2, the mothers must be both siblings and half-siblings…and I don’t even want to think about 15 = 8+4+2+1.

92.11  I stared at Chart 326…how do I extend these patterns? I took it to bed with me…I got up in the morning with it. Nothing budged. One thought I had for the mother’s lines was to “eliminate the middle man”…since going down a generation reduces the CR, why not have X and Y’s mothers be of different generations…mother and daughter instead of sisters. That way, instead of “going down” twice, you only go down once, relative to the older one….you divide by 2, not by 4. But as you can see in Chart 327, it was an interesting idea, but it didn’t help.

92.12  At this point, I wondered if 13, 14, and 15 were possible even with interbreeding.Well, I shouldn’t’ve worried, because they are, as you can see in Chart 328…where the colors of the sexes have been changed, suggesting we’re now in ancient Egypt or someplace.

And in Chart 329, the inner workings are spelled out. For 13, X and Y have married grandparents who are half-siblings…for 14, their married grandparents are full siblings…and for 15, their married great grandparents are full-siblings, as are their married grandparents. And notice what happened with 14…we said in 92.10 that we would need X and Y’s mothers to be both siblings and half-siblings, which is impossible. What they can be is siblings and double 1st cousins…and double 1st cousins have the same CR as half-siblings, 1/4 or 8/32.

92.13   Now one thing you can do when you’re stuck like this, you can “take a running start at it”…by which I mean, go back to simpler cases…see how they work out…and see if that suggests anything. So I retreated from 32nd’s…first back to 8th’s…and that looked kosher up to ½, nothing missing…

92.14   Next, 16th’s…and sure enough, 7/16 is missing…and we can start to sketch out the problem. For 7, we need a CR contribution of 4 from the fathers and 3 from the mothers. Now the fathers’ side is maxed out…X and Y have the same father…their fathers are related to each other by 1, since they’re the same person. And if you can see how 2 people could be more closely related than by being the same person, I’d sure like to hear about it! Using the divide-by-4 rule, X’s father and Y’s father are related by 1…so X and Y are related by 1/4…they are half-brothers thru their father. (Remember, full brothers are half-brothers thru their mothers and their fathers… 1/4 + 1/4 = ½.)

92.15  That leaves 3 we have to get thru X and Y’s mothers…but from the divide-by-4-rule, their mothers would need to be related to each other by 4 times that much…or 12/16…and full sisters are only 8/16. What it’s starting to look like is, you can’t get the CR’s between “3/4 siblings” and full siblings without interbreeding. So for example, with 64th’s you could get 24 for 3/4 siblings, and 32 for full siblings, but you couldn’t get 25 thru 31 without some kind of interbreeding…and if you’d like to check that  for me, I’d be super-delighted, you betcha.

92.16  So maybe that’s a small insight, one piece of the puzzle…or maybe I’m completely off base. I feel as if I’m missing something obvious, but I can’t put my finger on it. At the beginning, it seemed reasonable to think that if you could get 16/32 without interbreeding, you wouldn’t need interbreeding to get CR’s less than that…but so far, that intuition appears wrong. Next week, the letters will be really EASY, I can just feel it… 😉 😉  buenas nutcase…

__________________________________________

Copyright © 2012 Mark John Astolfi, All Rights Reserved

shameless plugs ÷ ∞ …um, this may take a while…

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podBeen.com  and   http://thewholething.podBeen.com

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1615157918836241443#editor/target=post;postID=6823903869203297907

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podBean.com

G4BB 91: Time Again For Mail Time

 

}}}}  Time Again for Mail Time  {{{{

Dear G4BB: I am in almost daily contact with the planet Xenobulax…and the inhabitants there thought you might be interested in what their genealogical charts look like.  …from Col. Bleep, Zero-Zero Island

91.0  My Dear Colonel: …and you’re right…I might be interested. Thanx, pal…out of this world. Seriously…I mean that…I’m touched you thought of me…cosmic…

Dear G4BB:  Re last week’s discussion of cousins sharing
grandparents…it occurred to me that not only could 2 people share both a grandfather and a grandmother, and still not be 1st cousins…but one of them could even have those grandparents as a married pair, and it still wouldn’t guarantee 1st cousins, as I have sketched out. Right?  …from Hominie, in Gritsburg

91.1  Dear Hominie: Of course right! Funny coincidence…I was using the smallest room in the house when that same idea popped into my head (no pun intended, but whatcha gonna do?) To recap, last week we were reviewing the inadequacies of trying to define cousinhood thru shared grandparents. On the left side of Chart 314, we see the typical 1st cousin arrangement…2 full brothers marry unrelated sisters and have sons X and Y. On the right side, X and Y also have a CR of 1/8, equivalent to that of 1st cousins, yet they are not 1st cousins, but double half-1st cousins…despite sharing a grandfather A and a grandmother B.

91.2  I have redrawn your diagram at the top of Chart 315…and you might wonder, does the fact that X has the shared grandparents thru just one of his parents make his relationship to Y more than just the double half-cousins illustrated in Chart 314? No, it does not…there are only 2 pairs of paths involved…from X and Y to B thru their fathers…and from X and Y to A thru X‘s father and Y‘s mother…so that’s of CR of 1/16 + 1/16 = 1/8.

91.3  By way of comparison, at the bottom of Chart 315 is the previous double half-1st cousins chart, on the left, and a re-drawn version on the right. It’s a matter of personal taste whether lines of descent crossing one another on such a chart makes it less clear…there’s certainly an argument that way. On the other hand, cross-overs do allow all those individuals of the same generation to appear on the same horizontal level, which you can’t do with non-cross-overs…unless you go “up and over,” which I’d just as soon not. Another thing that crossed lines allow for is shown in Chart 316…

91.4  …and I’d like to thank F. M Lancaster for the “trick” of connecting A to 4. Now X and Y are quadruple half-1st cousins, with a CR of 1/16  x  4 = 1/4, the equivalent of half-siblings, or double 1st cousins. X‘s grandparents are A/B and C/D, while Y‘s grandparents are B/C and A/D…no 2 pairs are the same. Yes, quadruple, because X and Y share all 4 grandparents…and yet they are not double 1st cousins nor even single 1st cousins, due to this unique “tag-team” arrangement. See what you started, Hominie? Hope you’re happy… 😉 😉

  

Dear G4BB: I’m confused…sometimes when you go down a generation, the degree of relationship is cut in half…like from your father to you it’s ½…then from your father to your son it’s half that, or 1/4. But other times it’s reduced by a quarter…like you and your 1st cousin  are related by 1/8, which is a quarter of the relationship between you and your father (or between your cousin and your uncle) not half. Why is it different?  …from Sonny in Business City

91.5  Dear Sonny: Actually, going down one generation is never “different”…it’s always one half, owing to the nature of sexual reproduction on our planet…i.e. 2 parents…could be different on Xenobulax, obviously. Thus, you as the offspring get half your genetic heritage from your father, half from your mother. You are related to everyone your father is related to, but only by half as much as he is.

91.6  Chart 317 is your father and a bunch of his relatives…then in Chart 318,  you come on the scene and your relation to all your father’s relatives is in each case half what his is. One peculiarity you’ll notice is that in doing this, your relation to your brother is 1/4, not ½…and that’s correct…thru your father, anyone who is his son has a Coefficient of Relationship with you of 1/4. The reason you and your brother have a  CR of ½ is that you also get 1/4 from your mother…so 1/4 + 1/4 = ½. Remember, full siblings are “double half-siblings.” And that’s why, when kinship was reckoned unilineally, or thru just one line, there was no difference between brothers and half-brothers…in each case, you had the same father and that was enough.

91.7  But the part of Chart 318 we must zero in on is between you and your 1st cousin…sure enough, the CR between your father and his father is ½…but between you and your 1st cousin, it’s 1/8…like you said, it looks like in this case going down a generation divides it by 4, not by 2. But you can now see what’s happening…between your father and your 1st cousin (his nephew), it’s half what it is between your father and your 1st cousin’s father (your father’s brother, your uncle)…1/4. And how could your 1st cousin be related to you by the same degree that he’s related to your father? Well, he can’t…which is why the half “doubles” when you are comparing 2 individuals, who are descended from 2 other individuals who are related to each other.

91.8  Thus we see on the right of Chart 319, A and B are half-1st cousins…a CR of 1/16. From A to B‘s son Y is half that, or 1/32…but between son Y and son X, it’s half again, or 1/64. You could look at it this way: between A and X, you go “go down once”…that’s A to X…and divide by 2. But between X and Y, you “go down twice”…A to X…and B to Y…so you divide by 2 twice, or 4. And this principle will come into play in a big way next week, when I tackle a seemingly innocuous task.

Dear G4BB: In my family, my parents had me when they were very young. They divorced, married other poeple and had separate families…then years later ended up remarried to each other and had my brother. I know he’s my full brother, but he doesn’t feel like it, since I was raised with one group of my half-siblings. Have you ever heard of such a thing?  Is there a name for it?  …Cindy Lou, from Ogdensvilleburg

91.8  Dear CL: No, I have to admit I haven’t….and I’m guessing this all happened a while back, since you say it was accomplished thru marriages and divorces. That’s old school for sure…today, lots of folks just don’t take the time or effort to bother with that sort of stuff. Name for it? How about “non-serial full siblings” or something along those lines.

91.9  But to review…chronologically…there’s you…then a group of your half-siblings thru your father, and another group thru your mother, one of which you were raised with…then a full brother. Unusual, certainly, but as your case demonstrates, not impossible. Charting it all out is another matter. Detailed genealogical information is best written out as text, as a list. For your father for example, you’d list his first marriage to your mother and the children that resulted (i.e. you)…then his second marriage to your step- mother…then his remarriage to your mother…with your mother’s second marriage in there too, so all your step-siblings are accounted for, as well as your Johnny-come-lately full brother.

91.10  Drawing a chart or diagram for an entire family seldom works…there’s just too much information and too many individuals to account for. To illustrate some small portion of your family, yes, a chart can work. One other factor is this: with a sequential list, you are able to indicate chronological order…which siblings were born first, which marriage came first, etc. You can try to do that with charts as well…first is on the far left, last is on the far right. But how in the world can we do that in your case, with the multiple marriages, remarriages, and sets of half-siblings?

91.11  One approach goes back to one of my earliest charts…and the idea that all individuals don’t have to represented by the same size or shape. In Chart 19, each of your successive ancestors gets “bigger”…which does 2 things: it keeps all the “Cousin Lines” in line…and it also shows how many of those descendants belong to each ancestor’s own individual line: simply those “below” him. But you know what? Maybe that goofy Xenobulaxian chart might come in handy…

91.12  Yeah, it looks pretty weird…and while the descendants of your full sibling and your half-sibling thru your father could just be placed underneath…there’s no room for the descendants of you or your half-sibling thru your mother…they would have to go on the right somewhere, with long lines connecting the generations…very messy. But Chart 320 does do 2 important things…first, all the siblings, half or whole, are connected to their respective parents…and second, the chronological sequence is maintained, left to right…first came you, then 2 groups of your half-siblings, then your parents reconnected for your full sibling. If you’ve got an eye for geometry, perhaps you could do better…I’d be pleased to see it! Till next time, aloha…

Wicked Ballsy

Classic humor is funny because everyone can relate to it…and everybody has family, right? Time and again, the great Groucho Marx would turn to family dynamics, with all its twists and turns. Take this exchange from You Bet Your Life…it was deemed too “racy” to be broadcast in the early 1950s, but the moment was saved for the “gag reel” shown to salesmen at sponsor’s conventions…

Groucho:  So you had 5 children and 2 pigs…
Woman:  But then we had 3 more…
Groucho:  3 more pigs?
Woman:  No, children.
Groucho:  And what about your husband?
Woman:  Oh, he’s dead.
Grouch0:  Really? Maybe he’s just hiding…

Pretty innocent, no? By the late 1960s, things had loosened up, and so we have this bit from a Kraft Music Hall TV roast of Johnny Carson, where Groucho says…

I  went to Johnny’s hometown in Nebraska and  I spoke with Johnny’s mother. Fortunately, she remembers him. She doesn’t remember his father, but she remembers Johnny. Then I spoke with Johnny’s first grade teacher. She doesn’t remember him…altho she does remember his father.

Of course Johnny took the ribbing in good humor…could I have been so gracious? I’m not sure I wouldn’t have asked Groucho: By the way, whose hair is that?  But finally, please enjoy this endearing ditty…

__________________________________________

Copyright © 2012 Mark John, All Rights Reserved

shameless plugs…visit them and you’ll always have good luck!

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podBeen.com  and   http://thewholething.podBeen.com

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1615157918836241443#editor/target=post;postID=6823903869203297907

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podBean.com

G4BB 90: Mail Time

/ / / / /   Mail Time!    / / / / /

90.1  Two questions today from the mailbag fit together nicely. But first, let me give you a list of relatives: mother/father, son/daughter, brother/sister, uncle/aunt, nephew/niece, grandfather/grandmother, grandson/granddaughter,  great grandparent/great grandchild, and cousin…which is to say, 1st cousin, offspring of your parent’s sibling. These form the basic core of our kinship terms and relationships…we learn them early on in life, and our understanding of them is rock solid.

90.2  When we move beyond them, many people get confused…and when I say “move beyond,” I simply mean using these relationships as compounds…building upon the basics, like this: father’s uncle, father’s cousin, cousin’s son, etc. When I listed those terms in 90.1, you probably thought of them as how they applied to you…they are the people most closely related to you. But your father has all these relatives too, and because he’s your father, they are all related to you as well…but how? Thus our first question…

Dear G4BB: What is the best way to explain how you are related to your 2nd cousin…so that others can understand it…and I can understand it myself?  …from Sparky, Sebastopol, CA

90.3  Dear Sparky: Good Grief! Excellent question. There are 3 basic definitions…all work, all are correct, but not all are equally clear…and you’re looking for the easiest to understand, nez pah? The Grandparent Definition is the worst, because it’s the hardest to understand…the Cousin Definition is the best because it’s the easiest to understand…finally, the Sibling Definition is also a good way, it’s a bit more complicated than the Cousin Definition…but only a bit more. We’ll examine each of these in turn.

90.4  Grandparent Definition of Cousins  (GDC)

          1st cousins share a common grandparent
          2nd cousins share a common great grandparent
          3rd cousins share a common great great grandparent

This is the most frequent way you will find Numbered Cousins defined…and it’s really a diservice, because taken literally, just as they are stated above, these rules fail in 2 different ways…and for them to be correct, they must be modified to the point where they  become very convoluted and confusing. True, once modified, they are completely correct and very understandable, if you take the time to note all the qualifications. In this way, the GDC becomes trustworthy, but unnecessarily cumbersome.

90.5  First way they fail: by the above definitions, your siblings are your 1st cousins, since you share with your siblings a common grandparent, right? Likewise, your siblings and 1st cousins are also your 2nd cousins…and your siblings, 1st cousins, and 2nd cousins all qualify as your 3rd cousins…which in each of these cases simply isn’t true. First modification, using the rule for 1st cousins as an example…share a grandparent as the closest common ancestor. Now while it’s true that you and your sibling have a common grandparent, that ancestor is not your closest common ancestor…your parent is. Thus, thankfully, you and your sibling are not 1st cousins. And this modification applies right down the line, to 2nd cousins, 3rd cousins, etc…

90.6  Second way they fail: Half-first cousins also share a grandparent as their closest common ancestor. But half-1st cousins are not 1st cousins…they share only 1/16 of their genes, while 1st cousins share 1/8. Half-1st cousins have the same grandfather, but different grandmothers…that grandfather had 2 different families with 2 different women. So the second modification could be:  …share 2 grandparents as the closest common ancestors. What we’re shooting for is shown above in Chart 312a. But this still doesn’t work, because you could be double half-cousins…that is, half-cousins on your father’s side and on your mother’s side…as in Chart 312b, you share 2 grandfathers and no grandmothers. OK then, make it …share a grandfather and a grandmother as the closest common ancestors. Again, this won’t do it, since as in Chart 312c, you could do that, have “one of each,” and still be double half-cousins, not full 1st cousins.

90.7  It should be obvious that what we really need is for you to share the same married pair of grandparents…but how do we say that succinctly, considering that they may not be married, just had children together? I’m going to stop here…as you can imagine, putting all this together does work, but it’s messy. If that were the only way to define Numbered Cousins, we’d be stuck with it…fortunately, it isn’t and we’re not…

90.8  Cousin Definition of Cousins  (CDC)

          1st cousins are the offspring of siblings
          2nd cousins are the offspring of 1st cousins
          3rd cousins are the offspring of 2nd cousins

Done and done…iron-clad and airtight. Notice that all the fuss about how many grandparents and precisely which ones is unequivocally decided by that one word “siblings.” Siblings are not half-siblings…siblings have the same father and the same mother…married, unmarried, doesn’t matter. Half-‘s are ruled out by definition…and going along, “offspring of 1st cousins” does the trick for defining 2nd cousins, “2nd cousins” for 3rd cousins, etc. (And if you’re of a truly mathematical bent, “siblings” can be replaced by “0th cousins…making it a definition derived only from cousins.)

90.9   OK, given people’s extraordinary ability to misunderstand even the simplest declarative sentence, you might suspect there is one tiny leak. But not really. I daresay 99.99% of the people reading the above CDC realize that the siblings who have the offspring who are 1st cousins, these siblings are not married to, or procreating with, each other. In the normal course of events, 2 brothers marry 2 women…these women are not related to each other, or to the brothers. But what if they were? Let’s take the worst case, and say you and I are back in ancient Egypt, and our parents are indeed brother and sister. We are siblings…we are also 1st cousins..in fact, double 1st cousins…that is, 1st cousins in 2 different ways, since my father is the sibling of your mother, and my mother is the sibling of your father. Fine, but the CDC rule still holds…it’s just that, besides being 1st cousins, we are also something else. But we are nevertheless 1st cousins. Now let’s take the CDC back one generation…

90.10  Sibling Definition of Cousins  (SDC)

          1st cousins have parents who are siblings
          2nd cousins have grandparents who are siblings
          3rd cousins have great grandparents who are siblings

Once again, the word “siblings”…now used to define each degree of Numbered Cousins…specifies 2 people who have the same father and the same mother…no half-‘s included.  And even if those siblings are procreating with each other, the definition still holds…it’s just that there will now be other ways the cousins are related besides what the definition says, as showed by our Egyptian example. Really, between the CDC and the SDC there is very little to choose…both absolutely nail the Numbered Cousin relationships…in some cases, one might be more useful in seeing the actual cousin connection than the other. Personally, I find the CDC a little clearer, that’s all…but not by much!

90.11  Then again, if you want  to complicate it, nobody’s stopping you…this then would be the equivalent of the SDC as stated above…still correct, just more wordy…and I wonder why you would feel the need to go both up and down the family tree…when simply going up will do the trick quite nicely, thank you…

     my 1st cousin is the child of my parent’s sibling
     my 2nd cousin is the grandchild of my grandparent’s sibling
     my 3rd cousin in the great grandchild of my great grandparent’s sibling

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear G4BB: I’m having an on-going argument with my brother. Can you have 2nd cousins without having 1st cousins? He says no way…I say of course way. Can you please help us?  …from Sissy in Siblingburg 

90.12  Yes, I can settle your squabble, which I hope hasn’t escalated to the point of one of you saying to the other: “Oh yeah? Well you were adopted!” But what I really like about your question is it gives me a chance to show how the above SDC can be preferable to the CDC. Look at SDC, and suppose your mother is an only child, and so is your father. You have no 1st cousins, since neither of your parents have siblings. But does that prevent your grandparents from having siblings? Of course not! Or your great grandparents? Ditto. So you could have 2nd cousins, and 3rd cousins, and on down the line. It’s just that simple.

90.13  Now it’s true you can draw the same conclusion from the CDC. The trouble is, it’s a little less obvious. If your parents have no siblings, you have no 1st cousins…and the 2nd cousin rule states:  2nd cousins are the offspring of 1st cousins. What you must realize is, since we’re talking about your 2nd cousins, “offspring of 1st cousins” doesn’t mean your 1st cousins…and anyway, we already know you don’t have any…it means your parent’s 1st cousins! And the only way your parent can have a 1st cousin is if your grandparent has a sibling, so we’re back to the SDC. See how it all ties together? Pretty cool, sez me.

90.14  BTW…Anyone who incorrectly thinks that your 2nd cousin is the child of your 1st cousin…would naturally conclude that without any 1st cousins, 2nd cousins aren’t possible. A valid argument, but an invalid conclusion nonetheless, because it’s based on a premise that is false. And anyway, it would only mean that you as 1C1R ascending wouldn’t have a 1C1R descending. But you yourself could be the 1C1R descending, and you could then have a 1C1R ascending…that is, your parent’s 1st cousin, which you would incorrectly…but at least if you’re being consistent…have to call your 2nd cousin…since you are his  2nd cousin in the sense of being the child of his 1st cousin. Perhaps that’s what was in your brother’s head…either way, you’re right, he’s wrong…as Archie Bunker would say, ipso fatso. See yez next week…

________________________________________

Copyright © 2012 Mark John, All Rights Reserved

shameless great great grandplugs…but aren’t they all…

Other  Blog at http://stolf.wordpress.com  (the legendary Stolf’s Blog)

Podcasts at http://stolfpod.podBeen.com  and   http://thewholething.podBeen.com

More bloggage at  http://travelingcyst.blogspot.com

Updated Resume at http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1615157918836241443#editor/target=post;postID=6823903869203297907

Audio samples at  http://stolfspots.podBean.com