All the king's soldiers
January 23, 2006 2:30 AM   Subscribe

How cocky was your great^10 grandfather? Up to 3 million men may be descended from an Irish King. Impressive but still well short of the estimated 16 million ancestors of Genghis Khan. Does the alpha male mojo that drives leadership also make a man a horndog or does being a high status male simply give one the opportunity that all men would gladly have? If you aren't constantly on the lookout for a new hen, perhaps you're not presidential material.
posted by missbossy (23 comments total)


 
I hate children, however if you did happen to have a harem and a vast region to populate I suppose you'd just have to get on with it.

Related to Niall of the Nine Hostages, vacapinta's first comment mystifies me to this day.
posted by NinjaPirate at 3:04 AM on January 23, 2006


mystifies?

I'm downright confused, cousin.
posted by jsavimbi at 3:28 AM on January 23, 2006


but do we have some descendant count of non kings as a yardstick - we dont really have anything to compare with - given that the worlds population is increasing but everyone has twice as many ancestors every generation back (to the limit of the population movement), then there should be lots of past people, male and female, with lots of progeny.
posted by zog at 3:37 AM on January 23, 2006


I'm a descendent of Genghis Khan, and I'm damn proud of it!
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:52 AM on January 23, 2006


Does the alpha male mojo that drives leadership also make a man a horndog...

Pronounced horndoggery (or is it horndoggedness?) wouldn't seem necessary. If a guy is the king, heterosexual, in possession of working genitalia, and living in a place where men had as many wives as they could afford and a women would line up to father the king's kids, he will have plenty of offspring. Give one or more of his descendants in every generation the same conditions and his genes will be everywhere very soon. It's good to be the king.
posted by pracowity at 3:59 AM on January 23, 2006


heh. cocky.
posted by wakko at 4:18 AM on January 23, 2006


Double on the Irish guy.
posted by Gator at 4:19 AM on January 23, 2006


> Double on the Irish guy.

Say, doesn't he get a free pass on up to 3 million?
posted by jfuller at 4:37 AM on January 23, 2006


wakko - heh. cocky.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. You don't know the half of it.
meath-stonedestiny
posted by tellurian at 4:40 AM on January 23, 2006


"Does the alpha male mojo that drives leadership also make a man a horndog..." - Well, sort of.

Among male social primates ( probably female too but at much lower levels ) Testosterone increases in relation to status. It's a feedback loop. Increased Testosterone boosts sex drive and aggression - meanwhile, females tend to prefer mating with high status males.
posted by troutfishing at 5:25 AM on January 23, 2006


Does this kind of genetic research add anything to the arguments of 'The Royal We' article so widely distributed which points out that everyone on the planet is, statistically speaking, a descendent of Confucius and Nefertiti? As zog points out, without a comparison to whichever plebian was nearby at the same time, isn't this just as irrelevant as the statistical assertions?
posted by anglophiliated at 6:29 AM on January 23, 2006


Does the alpha male mojo that drives leadership also make a man a horndog or does being a high status male simply give one the opportunity that all men would gladly have?

Like the ongoing nature vs. nurture argument, I'm gonna be a real beeeotch and sit on the fence and say "I reckon a bit of both".

To quote William Shakespeare from Twelfth Night:

"Be not afraid of horniness: some are born horny, some achieve horniness and some have horniness thrust upon them".
posted by uncanny hengeman at 6:37 AM on January 23, 2006


without a comparison to whichever plebian was nearby at the same time, isn't this just as irrelevant as the statistical assertions?

No, it's not just as irrelevant. The usual "is a descendant of..." is only that So-and-So is any random one of your ancestors at some point.

Being based on the Y chromosome, this is much more restrictive. These men are Niall's direct male descendants. Their father's father's father's ... father was Niall. Near as they can tell, anyway.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:45 AM on January 23, 2006


estimated 16 million ancestors of Genghis Khan...

I think you've put the czar before the hordes here.
posted by planetkyoto at 7:20 AM on January 23, 2006 [4 favorites]


ROU - ‘The Royal We’ discussion asserted that the rulers line survives due to the fact that it is protected where as the serfs line dies out due to disease and war and all the others problems that come with being something other than a member of the ruling class. In this way it is not so much random but statistically true that we descend from Nefertiti. It sounds like this might simply confirm the thesis with some biological evidence. So then nothing about Niall, or Nefertiti other than their position of power and thus privilege can really be inferred. I am curious as it seems we could spin this as easily in terms of class as we could in terms of primal masculinities.
posted by anglophiliated at 7:36 AM on January 23, 2006


I think you've put the czar before the hordes here.
posted by planetkyoto at 10:20 AM EST on January 23 [!]


Thanks for the bon mot, planetkyoto. Seriously funny!
posted by paulsc at 8:31 AM on January 23, 2006


I too am a descendent of Genghis Khan (or rather his nephew Kublai) and I'm pretty much his opposite. Huh.
posted by divabat at 8:42 AM on January 23, 2006


planetkyoto,

I'll do all czar funny stuff, you fahn kahn.
posted by uncanny hengeman at 8:45 AM on January 23, 2006


I too am a descendent of Genghis Khan (or rather his nephew Kublai) and I'm pretty much his opposite. Huh.
posted by divabat at 10:42 AM CST on January 23 [!]


It skips a generation. Watch your children carefully for affinity for blood and/or horsemanship.
posted by Ynoxas at 8:52 AM on January 23, 2006


Well, of course Mr L. Prosser was a direct patrilineal descent from Genghis Khan.

[/obtuse reference]
posted by edgeways at 8:52 AM on January 23, 2006


He had a prediliection for little fur hats, as I recall.
posted by Gator at 8:56 AM on January 23, 2006


ROU_Xenophobe writes "Being based on the Y chromosome, this is much more restrictive."

What ROU says. Also, just being descended from someone doesn't mean you share any genes with that someone -- his contribution could be "swamped" by other contributions.

You always shared 50% of each parent's genes, but in theory you could get from a parent only those genes the parent got from one of his or her parents (your grandparents), and no genes from that parent's other parent (your grandparent). That's extremely unlikely unlikely in two generations, but approaches certainty when there are many intervening generations.

The Y chromosome, however is different. Unlike the non-sex chromosome, it doesn't exchange DNA with its opposite pair. That means that you (if you're male) get exactly (but see below) the Y chromosome your father had, which is exactly the Y your grandfather had, etc.

So in the case of autosomal DNA, descent doesn't necessarily mean shared genes, just an on average sharing of some percentage of genes, where the percentage chance of sharing for any particular gene is 100/(2^generations prior to you)%. For the Y chromosome, descent means 100% sharing.

100%, except that the Y chromosome DNA degrades -- accumulates errors --, and those errors can't be corrected by recombination with an opposite chromosome pair. So you inherit it all, but it mutates faster than autosomal genes.
posted by orthogonality at 9:00 AM on January 23, 2006


but do we have some descendant count of non kings as a yardstick

No, the king-descendants that we can trace are merely the visible trace that shows that they have proven descendants today. If you do the math, it shows that beyond a given date (roughly 1000AD), if someone who lived then can be proven to have descendants today, we are all descended from that person to a probability of over 80% or so.

Give one or more of his descendants in every generation the same conditions and his genes will be everywhere very soon.

Actually, pronounced horndoggery probably isn't necessary at all, nor your conditions. The average man back then, at least in Western society, had as many children as he could afford (not as many wives -- although replacing a wife who died, usually in childbirth, was common), which was usually anywhere from 4 to 10 -- limited mainly by the survival of the wife.

Again, the "descendants of kings" is just the part we can track. If you're descended from one king, you're probably also descended from about 10,000,000 commoners of the same era (do the math; many of them will be the "same" ancestor, of course).
posted by dhartung at 9:31 AM on January 23, 2006


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