Icelandic fiction: a family affair | Hacker News Reader

Icelandic fiction: a family affair

the-tls.co.uk

25 pointssignor_bosco13 comments

> I spent the rest of the day running around Reykjavík, repeating what I had learned. Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir was my twenty-seventh generation ancestor. I was as good as Icelandic royalty. It wasn’t until late that evening that a friend explained that, well, everyone was. In a nation of 350,000 people, if your lineage remains unbroken from the tenth century, you are the ancestor of everyone.

I'm sure it's magnified in Iceland, but this is true in other countries and globally. When I traced my lineage back to Charlemange, I had a similar moment, telling a bunch of people at work because I thought it was interesting. As soon as the French guys heard it, they laughed and explained that the big joke in France is everyone's related to Charlemange.

After that, I realized it's actually plausible that everyone is related to Charlemagne. Moving backwards in time, we each have two parents. Conservatively assuming a generation is 30 years, Charlemagne was 40 generations ago. The theoretical maximum number of ancestors I have 40 generations ago is 2^40, or in other words, more people than have ever lived on the planet by many multiples. On the surface, and assuming a reasonable amount of mixing, that seems like it would make it extremely likely than anyone with any European ancestry is related to Charlemagne.

Several genealogy books reiterate this fact. After about a thousand years, nearly everone is your descendant or no one is. I believe this has been both proved by simulation and checking genealogic records. Some of the most detailed genealogies in the US are for the 45 Presidents. Most are descended from King John of England. Most are 11th cousins or closer to each other, including Obama via Mom's side.

> When I traced my lineage back to Charlemagne

Can you expand on how you were able to do this? I'm really interested in genealogy and I'd love to learn more about my own history. I figured AncestryDNA would be a good place to start, but how do you figure that out (assuming Ancestry doesn't help)?

I think I was using familysearch.org at the time. This was made easier by the fact that there are Mormons in my ancestry and my wife's, and both our families have records of recent ancestors dating back a couple hundred years. (They do gather history on everyone though, not only Mormons.) IIRC, I had to start from someone who was already deceased; I couldn't search living people at the time, at least on that site. I think that was a policy issue, not due to lack of data.

This comes with all kinds of caveats, some mentioned in the article; the records they have contain many errors and omissions and sometimes false history. Often getting multiple sources doesn't help because multiple people copied errors from the same source. But, it's super interesting anyway!

To be fair, at this point of removal the amount of DNA you share with Charlemagne is likely to be similar to the amount of silver nitrate in a homeopathic remedy.

Yeah exactly, if there's any left at all. Since DNA's finite and has fewer than 2^40 base pairs, any one person's direct DNA influence is likely to have been factored out completely.

Fun to think about the probabilities and combinatorics though. There are 2^40 "votes" in our ancestry for the time Charlemagne lived. Depending on how "prolific" he was, all the population crossover since then means he will occupy many of those 2^40 votes. Some people have a lot more influence than others, but it's nearly impossible to know.

Its smaller than that if count just the 21K coding proteins, two copies from both parents. If perfectly mixed you start losing ancestor contributions as soon as 16 generations or 400 years. But meiosis- the halving of DNA during creation of eggs and sperm- is not perfectly random, but chunky. So ancestor dropout occurs sooner.(It is hypothesized much of the other 98% of the genome has some sort of genetic influence too.)

Don't let the Descent From Antiquity people hear you say that!

It's good to see more mention of Halldor Laxness. His books are always pleasant - and often profound. A good starting place is The Fish Can Sing, which has the benefit of also being a shorter novel of his.

This is very interesting and sort of tangential to something I'd realized after I married a Scandinavian woman: If you want to get famous doing some thing, you haven't a shot in hell in a country with three hundred million people like the United States. But for example Sweden. Sweden has only nine million citizens, and more than ten percent of them live in Stockholm! This is such a relatively tiny audience. I imagined that anything you wanted to do: Write a book, sing a song, make a movie, open a restaurant, become a politician, play a sport, anything! It would be easier to attain status as noteworthy in a country with two orders of magnitude fewer people that all speak their own language, have their own culture, their own rules. I'm still convinced that this is the case, and I'd love the chance to test it someday.

Of course, please excuse my broad generalities and extreme oversimplification. But for example, most (non-Swedish) people don't know how much of Western culture is currently driven by Swedes. You go look at famous pop culture musicians and count how many of them are actually Swedes. You'll be surprised. Now, I haven't studied the rest of popular culture to know whether or not there is an equal amount of representation from other places e.g. Norway, Poland, etc. But it makes me wonder if these musicians -- every one of whom of course are as talented as can be -- if they are getting more international recognition because they have recognition in their own homeland? Or does Sweden produce musicians more appealing to Western popular culture? I'm not sure. So many questions, so many thoughts! One example of this type of idea that I've heard about in recent years is some woman from a wealthy family who did some kind of esoteric series of competitions -- skiing, I think? -- and was able to compete in the Olympics because of the lack of competitors for a slot in the team of a particular country. She was able to compete after winning a slot by default. This is sort of asymptotic to what I'm talking about, but not quite there. This is just a super-fascinating thing for me.

> But it makes me wonder if these musicians -- every one of whom of course are as talented as can be -- if they are getting more international recognition because they have recognition in their own homeland? Or does Sweden produce musicians more appealing to Western popular culture?

As far as I know, the working hypothesis is that Sweden's extensive social safety net (unemployment benefits,low-cost health care, fair insurance deals, so on and so forth) allows people to feel more secure in trying out things that may not become very profitable.

Oh, now that's an interesting proposition! I hadn't considered that, but it seems logically sound. Housing however is still a big issue in Sweden, not only with rent but with waiting lists in metropolitan areas, so it's still not completely safe to throw all caution to the wind.

On the other hand, you're much more likely to be able to carve out a niche for yourself and be niche-famous in a huge and varied country like the United States.

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