Italian heritage II:
After the DNA test that revealed "Italian-Greek" heritage in our family that we were unaware of, my brother and I offered differing theories on its origin:
1. My theory: There will be DNA of any given population floating around in adjacent populations. If you recombine groups of genes enough times, it's only a matter of statistical probability that some people in the adjacent populations will randomly end up with less than trace amounts of that DNA. I'm still attracted to this theory, but I've always been biased in favor of "systems" explanations.
2. My brother's theory: Two lines of my family lived in New York City (Brooklyn, to be precise) for decades around the turn of the twentieth century. This was the era in which New York City was the destination of a large number of immigrants from Italy. That must be, my brother says, where the Italian ancestry enters our family. His theory has a lot of merit, in that the amount (nine percent, on average) looks roughly like what a great-grandparent would bequeath you (100/8). This is also supported by the fact that my father never knew two of his grandparents: One died giving birth to my grandmother; the other died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 (in Brooklyn). So all the information that might have passed between grandparent and grandchild never had a chance to do so, twice over.
It seems unlikely to me that we'll ever find out.
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Meditations, Book IV, Section 17:
If so be that the souls remain after death (say they that will not
believe it); how is the air from all eternity able to contain them? How is the earth (say I) ever from that time able to Contain the bodies of them that are buried? For as here the change and resolution of dead bodies into another kind of subsistence (whatsoever it be;) makes place for other dead bodies: so the souls after death transferred into the air, after they have conversed there a while, are either by way of transmutation, or transfusion, or conflagration, received again into that original rational substance, from which all others do proceed: and so give way to those souls, who before coupled and associated unto bodies, now begin to subsist single. This, upon a supposition that the souls after death do for a while subsist single, may be answered. And here, (besides the number of bodies, so buried and contained by the earth), we may further consider the number of several beasts, eaten by us men, and by other creatures. For notwithstanding that such a multitude of them is daily consumed, and as it were buried in the bodies of the eaters, yet is the same place and body able to contain them, by reason of their conversion, partly into blood, partly into air and fire. What in these things is the speculation of truth? to divide things into that which is passive and material; and that which is active and formal.
