I am working on some very smart things to say here. Really. Meanwhile, there's 
I thoroughly enjoy the Last Word feature of New Scientist where the readers pose and answer questions amongst themselves. The questions are hilarious sometimes and always informative. Case in point: The question about the awful smell of human droppings.
Another question asked and yet unanswered is this. I am paraphrasing here. "If I try to calculate the number of my ancestors starting with my parents, the numbers don't add up. [My parents + their parents + their parents + .. ] is: [2 + 4 + 16 + ... and so on]. If I continue adding, very soon - within a few generations - I end up with an insanely large number of ancestors. I couldn't have possibly had so many ancestors. Heck, there never existed so many people to satisfy my ancestoral math. What's wrong with this calculation?" (Some of you may have read a similar question in one of Dawkins books. I remember reading this but forgot which book it was).
Comments
Inbreeding.
Posted by: eviledv | August 29, 2006 6:42 AM
I think it was "River out of Eden" by dawkins that had the question.
Posted by: sowmya | August 29, 2006 10:07 AM
Inbreeding is exactly right. If you (meaning anyone) trace your family tree back far enough, you'll see the same people occuring more than once.
Posted by: Colst | August 29, 2006 11:25 AM
Happy Father's Day, Uncle Dad!
Posted by: Chris | August 29, 2006 3:06 PM
what you have here is an upper bound on no. of ancestors at each level. and offcourse some of your ancestors from both sides overlap.
Posted by: raghav | August 31, 2006 4:36 PM