cousin
sciencepunk | May 13, 2010Over at Evolutionary Genealogy, Leonard Eisenberg has been thinking about how we're related to other animals. Not so much in the evolutionary sense, but in the familial sense. After all, if your cousin is simply the offspring of your parent's sibling, why not continue that logic back a few hundred millennia or so?
To make a rough estimate of the cousin and removal relationship between you and any other living thing, all one needs to do is count up the generations back to the common ancestor. This sounds easy in theory but is complicated in practice. First, make an estimate of the number of…