Is This Woman the Living 'Code'?

USA TODAY ^

[doesnt suffer fools gladly]

USA must be posted as a title and link only.

[gondramB]

>>Brown made famous in his mega-selling novel, says she's ready to cope with people who think she's crazy or a heretic.<<

But is she prepared for we sensible people who will ignore her?

[MplsSteve]

Interesting.

Unlike Salman Rushdie, she won't have a fatwah issued against her though.

That's the difference between THEM and US.

[LucyT]

McGowan, a journalist and a third-generation Hollywood native<<<<

[D-fendr]

Yeah. And I'm Princess Anastasia.

[Celtjew Libertarian]

But is she prepared for we sensible people who will ignore her?

I'm sure her sales will be just about as good.

But if you're posting about her, are you ignoring her?

[cmsgop]

And I am George Wallace.....

[gondramB]

>> I'm sure her sales will be just about as good.

But if you're posting about her, are you ignoring her?<<

Oh, no I'm caught in an posting paradox. I better stop now before it becomes a wormhole and sucks me in. :)

[MindBender26]

This is BS, because if Mary M and Jesus had a child, its bloodline would be in every person on Earth!

Do the math.

One generation every 20 years (it was less in earlier times), average two children per couple.

Since there is a doubling every generation (two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents. etc.), the number of people on earth carrying Jesus' and Mary M's bloodline would be 2 to the 100th power, or about
1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376.

That is more than the people on earth, because some people would have died over the centuries, and some would have multiple sources of the bloodline.

DVC is reasonably good fiction, but the idea of one bloodline carrier is BS. Do the math!

[highlander_UW]

So is she willing to have a through DNA test to prove her claims to both descendant of the French monarchy as well as middle eastern blood? Since it's already been proved that the French royalty didn't have any middle eastern markers it should prove an interesting result.

[MindBender26]

PS The 2 to the 100th power comes from the doubling in 100 generations since about 33AD.

[philetus]

Meet Kathleen McGowan, novelist and self-proclaimed descendant of a union between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

[AHerald]

Todd says she has no problem believing McGowan's claim that she descends from a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. "Yes, I believe her. Her passion and her mission are so strong, how can she not be?"

Man, have I got a Nigerian email for Todd ...

At least she's a book editor and not a parole board member.

[SWAMPSNIPER]

I'm the rightful heir to the Throne of Scotland, that and a buck will get me a cup of coffee!

[Xenalyte]

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.

-Dorothy Parker

[MindBender26]

>Her passion and her mission are so strong, how can she not be?

Stop in any mental hospital. You will meet 20 Napoleons, 12 Jesuses and assorted Kings, Dukes, Princes.... and a whole lot of Queens!

[cmsgop]

That's no fun, you're supposed to post a funny pic

[Xenalyte]

[Myrddin]

Your knowledge of biology is dwarfed by your demonstrated mathematical skill. Half the genome is passed on each generation. If passed to a single child in each 20 year generation, you would have 100 generations with 1 child each spread over 2000 years. That's 100 people TOTAL over 2000 years. The person living today would possess a fraction of the original DNA in the amount of (1 / 2**100). The probability of finding a specific marker is vanishing small. Spending more than 5 minutes paying attention to this crackpot is a terrible waste of time.

[woofie]

People in my bloodline:

[MindBender26]

No math skill. I entered 2 times 2 = on the Windows calculator, then hit the = key 99 more times!

:~)

[Hound of the Baskervilles]

"So is she willing to have a through DNA test to prove her claims to both descendant of the French monarchy."

There was a documentary on the Discovery Channel where the host went to a museum and got a tooth from the mummy of a provable Merovingian queen and had a DNA check on it. The results were that there was NO Middle Eastern blood line running in the French Merovingian monarchy. The scientist who did the test said, NO WAY. There just cannot be any more conclusive proof than this. It was a serious test.

[MindBender26]

Andy marries Beth (who was daughter of Jesus)
Andy and Beth give birth to Charlie and Donna.
These two kids now have "blood' (gene)

Charlie marries Ethel. Donna marries Frank.
Charlie and Ethel give birth to George and Harry. Donna and Frank have Iris and Janet.
Now these four kids(G.H.I and J)have gene...

G marries K
H marries L
I marries M
J marries N.

Each of these four couples has two kids. Now eight children have the gene....

And so it goes

[fnord]

when your result lies outside even the remotest possibility, it is a good idea to re-examine your assumptions and methodology.

[MindBender26]

Referring to my calculation or her claim?

Remember, my # assumes each person has only one link to Jesus and none have died since 33 AD. Actual number would be lower, about 96.6% of people on Earth now, segregated by race and area.

For example, less chance in Australian Aborigines, Montanyards, isolated South Pacific tribes, etc.

Almost 100% surety in Middle East, Europe. NA, SA but less in Central Asia, India, Far East and Africa.

[highlander_UW]

I saw the same, or a similar program...so it'd be interesting to see her sputtering when she ends up having to explain how she is descended from a Jew without any of the appropriate DNA markers...and she probably isn't related to French royalty either. Just another fraud trying to ride on Dan Brown....a fraud himself.

[Myrddin]

You assume geometric growth, two viable offspring from every couple, 100% mobility, no cultural or racial or religious limits and immortality. Even if all that silliness holds true, any given individual would have the genome diluted by (1 / 2¹⁰⁰) making it statistically impossible to prove any association. If you could find a pure matriarchal lineage, you might demonstrate nearly identical mitochondrial DNA. Getting a unique match in the 46 chromosome set of a human would very unlikely.

[fnord]

referring to your calculations

look at it another way:
you have 2 parents, they have 2 parents, and so on and so on.
using your figure of one generation per 20 years,
going back 100 years you would have 32 (2**5) direct ancestors.
going back 200 years you would have 1024 (2**10) direct ancestors
going back 300 years you would have 32768 (2**15) direct ancestors
going back 400 years you would have 1 million (2**20) direct ancestors
...
going back 1000 years you would have 1 million billion (2**50) direct ancestors

since this probably exceeds the number of people who have ever lived, the assumptions and methodology are in error

reductio ad absurdum

[MindBender26]

We both agree this is all bunk. I'm also not allowing for a much larger number that would be caused by the larger families of earlier times.

Bottom line, not traceable, not verifiable, not significant, not important.

[patriot_wes]

"Meet Kathleen McGowan, novelist and self-proclaimed descendant of a union between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. McGowan, who says she is from the "sacred bloodline" Brown made famous in his mega-selling novel, says she's ready to cope with people who think she's crazy or a heretic"

If Jesus didn't do what he claimed he'd do and what his disciples claimed he did then there's nothing "sacred" about him or this looney.

[MindBender26]

We are not taking into account marrying very distant relatives, etc, which reduces number.

A better way to look at this is to say that every human on earth is probably (very distantly) related to everyone else, eveb without Adam and Eve.

[RichInOC]

McGowan, who says she is from the "sacred bloodline" Brown made famous in his mega-selling novel, says she's ready to cope with people who think she's crazy or a heretic.

You've got complete certified birth records going generation to generation, all the way back (and I do mean all the way back) to Jesus and Mary Magdalene? This I do have to see.

[fnord]

exactly, guess I didn't state my point very well

(btw, "pedigree collapse" is the term for the duplication of ancestors as you retrace the family tree)

while you can say we are all related to each other through some indeterminate ancestor at some point in the distant past, that is entirely different from saying we are all related through a specific ancestor.

[stands2reason]

I'm descended from the Hugh Capet, but I don't claim Jesus as my forbear.

That's just silly.

[Dr Stormfist]

Okay, so she is the mother of Rose McGowan...and if she were of "holy" blood...why did she let her daughter marry Marlyn Manson...who thinks he is "evil"???

And Kathy McGowan was part of a cult called "The Children of God"...if you spend enough time in a cult, you'll believe anything you are told...because you stop existing.

[The_Reader_David]

Your analysis is a little simplistic, but the conclusion is spot on. There have recently been proofs given that under much more realistic probabalistic assumptions about number of offspring, near-relative marriages, and the like, that with probability very close to 1, any given person two-thousand years ago either has no living descendants, or a number of living descendants on the order of the population of the world.

[cookcounty]

Is this the same lady who walks around Ben Yehuda street in Jerusalem with a staff and a white cape decorated with rhinestones and calls herself "the prophetess?"

[Mad Dawg]

You've got complete certified birth records going generation to generation, all the way back (and I do mean all the way back) to Jesus and Mary Magdalene? This I do have to see.

Dan Rather got them from some guy in Texas.

[ccmay]

while you can say we are all related to each other through some indeterminate ancestor at some point in the distant past, that is entirely different from saying we are all related through a specific ancestor.

That is true as far as it goes.

However, it is a mathematical certainty that anyone who was alive at the time of Jesus, and who has any living descendants today, is an ancestor of everyone who is now alive.

There was an interesting article about this in the Atlantic magazine a few years back: The Royal We.

-ccm

[kalee]

She should claim to be the 12th Imam. That would really get her some publicity.

[RichInOC]

Okay, how'd the first-century scribes get hold of a computer with Microsoft Word?

:-D )))

[ccmay]

So is she willing to have a through DNA test to prove her claims to both descendant of the French monarchy as well as middle eastern blood?

It's not that simple. The only markers that hold true from one generation to the next are the Y chromosome in men, and mitochondrial DNA in women.

All the other chromosomes are duplicated in each individual of either sex, so everyone has two copies of the DNA coding for any particular gene. The other chromosomes reassort themselves every generation in the process known as meiosis.

But because it is (generally) only whole chromosomes that reassort, rather than individual genes in each chromosome, it is wrong to speak of having a "few drops" of some kind of blood or a few strands of DNA from any particular ancestor, even if you can prove beyond doubt that he is in your family tree. You do not carry any DNA from the vast majority of your ancestors. (This is a simplification, as there is a phenomeonon called "crossover" in which shorter segments of DNA can be transferred between pairs of homologous chromosomes, but the effect over many generations is still the same.)

To illustrate, let us ignore the X and Y sex chromosomes, and suppose that we carry 23 pairs of regular non-sex chromosomes (properly called autosomes). Everybody has 2 copies of each chromosome, one you got from your father and one from your mother. In turn you will pass on only one of your two copies of each chromosome to each of your children. However, these chromosomes are passed on at random, so you might have gotten two completely different copies of a given chromosome than your brother or sister got, despite you having the same parents.

In mathematical terms, of all the DNA that one of your parents has, you get only half of it from him or her. You inherit only one-quarter of the DNA that any of your grandparents had, one-eighth of your great-grandprents' DNA, and so on.

Eventually you get to your great-great-great-great grandparents, of whom there are 64 altogether. But you only have 46 chromosomes! It stands to reason that on the average, 46 of your great-great-great-great-grandparents passed on just one of their chromosomes to you, while 18 of them did not pass on any chromosomes to you and hence you share none of their DNA.

Going back even further, if you get to your eleventh-great-grandparents, there are over 10,000 of them in your family tree, but only 46 of them managed to contribute to the DNA you carry in your body.

-ccm