The Lemon Fool

The BBC is heavily trailing the royal connection of Danny Dyer to Edward III ,notwithstanding that given the 27 generations since the 14th century then mathematically he would have had more than 134,000,000 ancestors ( 2^27 ) alive at that time, at a period when the population of Britain was less than 6,000,000.

The power of propaganda when mathematics are omitted.

I like history programmes, but that trailer makes me cringe so much I'll make every effort to avoid this show.

Scott.

I just avoid DD (cant even bring myself to type the name)

marronier wrote:The BBC is heavily trailing the royal connection of Danny Dyer to Edward III ,notwithstanding that given the 27 generations since the 14th century then mathematically he would have had more than 134,000,000 ancestors ( 2^27 ) alive at that time, at a period when the population of Britain was less than 6,000,000.

The power of propaganda when mathematics are omitted.

So that's roughly 20x more ancestors (mathematically) than the population at the time.

Obviously some incest/cousin marriage can lessen that gap. And some foreign ancestorship too, but there does seem to be a big gap to bridge there.

Any ideas why?

chas49 wrote:

marronier wrote:The BBC is heavily trailing the royal connection of Danny Dyer to Edward III ,notwithstanding that given the 27 generations since the 14th century then mathematically he would have had more than 134,000,000 ancestors ( 2^27 ) alive at that time, at a period when the population of Britain was less than 6,000,000.

The power of propaganda when mathematics are omitted.

So that's roughly 20x more ancestors (mathematically) than the population at the time.

Obviously some incest/cousin marriage can lessen that gap. And some foreign ancestorship too, but there does seem to be a big gap to bridge there.

Any ideas why?

Incest, as you put it, is a matter of degree.

If you consider a historical patriarch from 1000 years ago who sired lots of children, it's very likely that both you and your wife/husband are descended from him (unless one of you is from different racial stock). That doesn't make your marriage and its progeny incestuous.

How the numbers work is, the more generations back you go, the more chance that particular individuals feature more than once in your ancestry. From memory, Charlemagne is supposed to be an ancestor of something like most of christian Europe.

I've no idea how widespread Edward III's descendants may be, but surely what they're talking about isn't a statistical likelihood but a traceable bloodline. Some people take a lot of interest in genealogy.

DD

Why?