Using the principle of reductio ad absurdum, you can prove that every human being alive today, all seven billion plus, are descended from a single woman who would have lived 100k to 200k years ago. This fact is evident in that all human beings share the same mitochondrial DNA that we each inherent from our mother via the X chromosome. And in fact, using reductio ad absurdum proves that if one were to go sufficiently forward in time one would either be an ancestor of everybody or nobody, and there would be no intermediaries. Similarly, if you went sufficiently backwards in time each person you met would either be an ancestor of everyone alive today or none of us, again with no intermediaries. And perhaps even more striking is that if you were to do a thought experiment and go backwards in time along your line of ancestors by ten million generations youd be looking at a fish. And using the same principle discussed above, every fish in that pond would either be an ancestor of all humans alive today or none of us and there are no intermediaries.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 05:08:01 +0000
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