Description of 88- Different Types of Cousin
First cousins, second cousins, fourth cousins three times removed... What's the difference? And if all three billion letters of your genetic code were unique, how distant a relation would you have to have before the two of you didn't share any of these original letters anymore? This scenario has some assumptions, but we'll use it to explore how large the human genome is!
Sources for this episode:
Berger, B. M. (1960), How Long Is a Generation? The British Journal of Sociology 11(1): 10-23.
Bistritzer, T., Fried, K., Lahat, E., Dvir, M. and Goldberg, M. (1993), Congenital contractual arachnodactyly in two double second cousins: possible homozygosity. Clinical Genetics 44: 15-19. (for second cousins, nothing except abstract)
Matsamura, S. and Forster, P. (2008), Generation time and effective population size in Polar Eskimos. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 275: 1501-1508.
McDermott, M., Genealogy Explained (2022, updated 2024), What are Double First Cousins (online) (Accessed 24/04/2024).
Skipper, M. (2012), User’s guide to the human genome. Nature Reviews Genetics 13: 678.
Author unknown, Ancestry (date unknown), What is a second, third, or fourth cousin- or a cousin once removed? (online) (Accessed 24/04/2024).
Author unknown, Wikipedia (date unknown), Family tree of English monarchs (online) (Accessed 24/04/2024).
Author unknown, Wikipedia (date unknown), Family tree of the British royal family (online) (Accessed 24/04/2024).
Author unknown, 23 and Me (date unknown), Average Percent DNA Shared Between Relatives (online) (Accessed 24/04/2024).