X-Message-Number: 4781
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 1995 11:59:50 MST
From: "Richard Schroeppel" <>
Subject: Genetic Reconstructability

John Clark commented on Moravec's notion of reconstructing people
from the impression they made on the world around them.  (I personally
prefer Woody Allen's strategy.)  Although this seems, er, unlikely to
work, I wanted to point out a very weak form of it that is conceivable.

We could probably reconstruct the genome of "most" people who ever
lived, by analyzing the genomes of currently living people.

Some obvious caveats:  Many people die childless, many tribes have
been completely wiped out, and you will have a lot of trouble telling
twins apart.  A population that shrinks (Navajo, ...) will lose
information.  And you might well get only a partial reconstruction
as you went further back.  Finally, this is cryonically pointless,
since it doesn't preserve our personal experience, or the random,
non-geneticly determined information about our body - the state of
the immune system, scars, muscle development, details of the blood
vessel layout, and probably details of the neural circuitry.

Flipping back to the positive view:  If I sequence my genome and
that of my sibs, and half-sibs, I can deduce most of my parents'
genome.  If I include information about cousins and more distant
relatives, the reconstruction can be nearly complete.  This
information can be used to deduce my grandparents DNA, and so on.
Each stage of the reconstruction loses a little information, but
not much.  Even if you've lost the records of who is whom's dad,
and which people are closely related, this information can be
filled in from the degree of matching in the deduced genomes.

This should allow an interesting reconstruction of much of history,
determining which groups moved where, and when.  There are two
other kinds of information to tie the genomes to historical data:
Occasional tissue samples, like the guy frozen in the Alps, mummies,
and perhaps bits of skin or dried blood in pottery & archeological
artifacts (and books!).  And historical records of ruling families
might be matched up with the tree built from genetic data.

Rich Schroeppel  


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