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Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

I agree with everything in this article, but there are a few things that make me go hmm.

* The reference to / advertisement of obscure online communities (Agor? Darkworld?)

* The quoted tweet about bloodlines. There are no lines worth speaking of in biology, there are webs. You are not the last one in a very long line, you're a twig on a very big tree. People who talk about their bloodline are often a bit iffy.

So why do I make an issue of it, when I agree with everything they say anyway? Because I actually agree with a lot of what lots of weird sects say - in public. The advertising pitch is often very reasonable even for groups like Mormons or Scientologists, which are 50-250 years out of touch with the trends of the times. This post is very sensible, but it feels like a pitch for something which isn't quite as easy a sell. Maybe this Agor thing.

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> The quoted tweet about bloodlines. There are no lines worth speaking of in biology, there are webs. You are not the last one in a very long line, you're a twig on a very big tree. People who talk about their bloodline are often a bit iffy.

A fun thought exposing the silliness: every woman without a daughter is the end of a chain of mothers going back millions of years.

As an only child being the "last of my bloodline" has given me a great deal of anxiety. Evidently out of ignorance. Where can I learn about lineage being more of a web than a line?

Count your blessings; I’m extremely pleased to be the last of my bloodline.

You already know about it, just in different terms. You have one father and mother, but two grandfathers, four great grandfathers, four great grandmothers, etc. Which of these is your "bloodline"? Either all of them or none. Each of them is likely (in the general case anyway) also a grandparent to many other children with other intermedaries. Which of these is their descendant bloodline? If you get rid of weird socially contingent criteria like "first son", the answer is obviously none of them. It's just a big web, going back thousands of years at minimum. Billions of years back to the first sexually reproducing eukaryote, if you want to think of it that way.

Id argue that it’s not ignorant, it’s socially constructed.

Just track your genealogy. Go up like 3-4 nodes from your parents and then expand the tree from there.

The expansion gets even more extreme if you start your expansion further up the tree, as the average number of children per household goes up dramatically as you go further back in time.

https://populationeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/a...

Genetically, you're just about as close to your great-great-grandfather as his second daughter's son's third daughter's nephew is.

Unless you've been in some sort of clan war for generations or your family has been the target of small-scale genocide, you're unlikely to be the 'last of a bloodline'.

At a complete guess, that may be inaccurate because I don't know you? What you possibly have is a biological imperative to reproduce, perhaps some social expectation or personal desire to have a family, which combine to create the anxiety. Then the anxiety manifest as magical thinking about "being the last" in a way to drive attention to the underlying issues. Is it 'being the last' or 'being alone' that's the real driver?

Webs are made of lines. A twig has a path back to the root. And you are only a leaf node until you reproduce, after which you are a branch and perhaps a shared part of this “web.”

In other words, is your issue with the usage of the term that it mistakes a set of O(2^n) bloodlines for 1?

>People who talk about their bloodline are often a bit iffy.

On the other hand though, people who don't are often as an aggregate group destroying a lot of twigs to the detriment of the tree, all the while pretending their love the tree in general that's why they don't care for their twig.

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