Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 35, Number 79, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 June 1903 — Net a Genius But an Idiot. [ARTICLE]

Net a Genius But an Idiot.

According to a floating item that is going the rounds of the newspaper: “A genius has been figuring out how many ancestors a man has. First he takes your father and motner-that makes two human beings. Each of these must also have a father and mother—that makes four more human being. Each of them must have had a father and mother-and that makes eight more human beings. So he goes on baok fifty-six generations whioh brings him to the time of Jesus Christ. The calculation thus resulting shows that 130,235,017,489,534,976,458 births must have taken plaoe in order to bring you into this word —you who read these lines.” All of whioh is the rankest nonsense, and based on the assumption that all of every per sons’ ancestors were totally unrelated to every other one, even in the remotest degree. As a matter of fact if the human raoe has existed on the earth a million years and all that time contained as many people as it now does, there would not have been one millionth as many people born in that million years, as are given in the above figures as being born in less than two thousand years. At the earth’s present population 40,000,000 births a year keep it up. At that rate it would require over 3,000,000,000,000 years for as many people to be born as the alleged “genius” figures for a paltry 20 centuries.