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(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2026
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Similarly: we all come from an unbroken line of people who had children.
It may be that throughout history not having kids is common. Gay people who never had children may have been common. Ugly, poor or unpleasant people who never managed to find a partner may have been common. Asexual people may have been common.
Straight people who had sex but never had kids were probably not common, just because good contraception wasn't available.
Still, if you're a person who, for whatever reason, is not going to have kids, none of your direct ancestors can understand that life.
indeed we come from an unbroken line of animals who had offspring. you can hop back one generation at a time til you get to our early ape ancestors, then those shrew-like things, reptiles, fish, then single cell organisms, in the end you'll reach the very first cell to ever exist, one single cell from which every living thing evolved.
Unless there was some simultaneous evolution. The first cell-like thing probably evolved from something almost cell-like before that. If conditions were right for that cell-like thing to happen, it might have happened more than once, so you might have multiple ancestors that were all among the first cells.
Not just people, it goes back all the way to the origin of life, whether that happened here or elsewhere and life just somehow ended up migrating here.
There's an unbroken hereditary line between each of us and cells that first tried to eat mitochondria and instead of breaking them down into one meal's worth of energy and nutrients, they ended up forming a symbiotic relationship, giving our ancestors (and us) the ability to take more energy from the oxygen that was slowly filling the atmosphere than it was causing damage and surviving the earliest known mass extinction as well as snowball earth.
Then our lineage was able to survive the Cambrian explosion, I'm guessing that's than brains evolved and suddenly life could control a wide variety of different shapes and body types and it did before settling in to the more common body types that survived to this day.
We survived countless mass extinctions, including all of the major ones, like massive asteroid impacts that rained molten glass all over the globe just from the rebound and made today's global warming seem quaint. Each of our ancestors was able to survive to the age of reproduction without getting eaten by the giant insects of the Carboniferous (though we were still in the water so kinda lucked out), we survived the early oceans/seas, the emergence of amphibians and reptiles. We survived the dinosaurs, probably as tiny nocturnal rodents. We survived past that when birds and mammals diversified after the dinosaurs were gone.
We survived when primates started changing the very nature of the game of survival, despite several other species getting a head start on populating the globe. For better or worse, we took the planet from Neanderthals, homo erectus, the Denisovans, the hobbit-like hominids, and any others that left Africa before us (not to mention dominated the competition inside Africa).
Only at that point did we start surviving the brutal history of our species and all the wars, famines, plagues, natural disasters, building collapses, personal disagreements that could have turned violent, religions, brutal rulers, collapses of civilization, and emergence of the next set of bandit or war lords.
Also billions of years of single-celled competition prior to that mitochondria symbiosis event.
First law of socio-genetics: Celibacy is not hereditary
From some book of Murphy's laws I found at home as a kid and fell in love with
Not necessarily accurate, though.
See selfish genes (ideally from someone other than Dawkins), and gay uncle hypothesis.
I don't know what a selfish gene is and I cba to read a textbook right now, but IF you really want to take this seriously, a recessive gene is enough to make the statement untrue.
I do however suspect that this joke law was meant as a joke.
tldr: natural selection doesn’t select for fit individuals, it selects for genes, and at the population level. Plenty of species have strong drives in individuals that will destroy their individual fitness, like bees and ants, but those genes survive just fine.
Also the unfortunate truth of rape. Rapists aren't exactly picky
My bloodline ends with me, and everything ive ever done has culminated in this exact moment (at time of writing)
A bloodline ending is also probably incredibly common. But, not once in our direct ancestors has a bloodline ever ended.
That's actually one of the things that got me thinking about this. My family has a tradition that the first born son always gets a certain first name. My dad's the third-born male, so he didn't get the name, and didn't pass it down to me. But, his oldest brother did, so it's my cousin's name.
My cousin's probably not going to have kids. Or, if he does, they'd be happy little accidents who aren't part of the family and don't get the first-born-son name. So that name and that tradition dies with him. It's a bit unfortunate because over time that first name has become less common and I like the name. So, for the first time in centuries(?) there won't be someone with that name.
I thought about it a bit, and realized, it's probably actually fairly common. When you're the end of a chain like that, you might feel pressured because everybody before you had carried on the tradition and passed on the name. However, that has to be the case, because if your father or grandfather had failed to pass on the name, you wouldn't be around to see it.
There are probably "bloodlines" ending all the time. But if you're part of a "bloodline", it probably feels like a big deal because everybody until you has ensured it survived.
(Having said that, "bloodlines" are a dumb concept, since each parent provides about 50% of the DNA. So, even if you're a "Trey" and share the same name with your dad and grandfather, you only share half your DNA with your dad and a quarter with your grandfather. In a sense, you could say that the strength of every bloodline is cut in half with every generation. That is, unless you're breeding with blood relatives, and then the bloodline may be strong, but the genetic disorders are even stronger.)