Grand Randomness

First cousins, all 25% Puerto Rican in theory.

Given that this vacation in the North Carolina Outer Banks may be the biggest confluence of my family ever, I have been thinking a lot about family and how it forms us individually. It's amazing to see all of the parts of the great machine in motion together over an extended period of time.

One thought I had concerns genetic inheritance from grandparents. We know that half of our DNA comes from each of our parents, and their DNA comes equally from their parents. It might seem reasonable to assume that we therefore get exactly a quarter of our makeup from each of our four grandparents, but I realized that assumption is not quite accurate.

The reason is that our DNA is grouped into chromosomes, 23 each from our mother and our father. This quantization prevents uniform inheritance. Right off the bat since we receive an odd number of chromosomes from each parent, we cannot receive an even number from each of our parents' parents. If I have 12 chromosomes from my mother's father, I have 11 from my mother's mother, and the split cannot be made even.

Moreover, there is nothing guaranteeing an even split. Whether or not each chromosome from our mother comes from her mother or her father is essentially a coin flip, and like coin flips the selection for each chromosome is independent. So, the fact that the chromosome 8 my mom passes on to me might come from her mother has no bearing on whether or not chromosome 9 does. That means it is theoretically possible for her to pass on only her mother's chromosomes or only her father's, though that is only as likely as flipping 23 heads or 23 tails in a row (about one in four million). Such children are genetically equivalent to children of one grandparent, and genetically unrelated to the other!

Therefore consider first cousins. There is good reason to expect they could take after their shared grandparents to differing degrees because they will inherit different proportions of their grandparents' DNA (to say nothing of the fact that they are inheriting from different subsets of that code due to having different parents).

How significant is this variation? Well, if my calculations are correct a full 32% of people inherit the most equitable 11/12 split from a given pair of grandparents, and 91% are no worse than an 8/15 split. So most people are relatively even combinations of their grandparents. But the flip side of that conclusion is that about one in eleven inheritances gets twice as much of one grandparent as the other. Since we inherit from two sets of grandparents, it is almost double that probability that we have at least one lopsided inheritance.

If these assumptions hold (and I don't expect they are changed by higher order effects), 18% of people, almost one in five, has received a lopsided amount of DNA from one grandparent.The effects of that randomness only multiply through subsequent generations, meaning it's even more likely inheritance from great grandparents isn't equitable. After all, we all have 64 great great great great grandparents, but only 46 chromosomes total. Someone (or 18 people) is going to be squeezed out, save for other effects like crossing over.

For me there are two takeaways of this reasoning. The first is that it is indeed possible to take after a particular grandparent more than the others, as far as genetics go anyway. The second is that it would be really fun to get everyone in my family's genomes sequenced so that all of this movement could be charted through the family tree rather than merely speculated on.

The Block From Which I Chip?

Unintentional coordination.
I almost wore a grey tie, too.

He's the source of one fourth of my genes, and now he's joined the blogosphere!

He's my grandpa. I've often thought that if you were to give him a typewriter and lots of time, he could provide you with volumes upon volumes of encyclopedic knowledge. Perhaps his blog is the closest we'll ever get.

The title, too, delights my sense of wordplay. It's called "View from the West Lea:"

west (noun):*
1 a: the general direction of sunset : the direction to the left of one facing north b: the compass point directly opposite to east

lea (noun):*
1: grassland, pasture

Wesley (noun):
1: Grandpa's first name.

To complete the picture, know that Grandpa will often be writing about issues pertinent to where he lives, on the west bank of the Chesapeake Bay. So the title represents both his point of view and the area about which he's writing.

Zing!

*Definitions from Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.

Idiosyncrasies at Mealtime

I think signs of health in families are habits and traditions that would seem weird to outsiders. At dinnertime I was mildly embarrassed to observe:

Milk. 1% for Mom, skim for me, and whole for my stepdad.

Of course, you take the delicious with the embarrassing:

We make pizza.

A Dog Named Bear

Puppy!

Marley & Me this will not be, but my dog was put down today and I thought I'd share some memories:

• We got Bear when I was about 11 because my sister and my dad wanted a dog. Someone from my mom's work was looking to get rid of him; they had a new baby and thus no more need for him. They assured us that he was well trained, and he sat and shook hands, so we took him.
  
  Let's just say Bear's dalmatian half (the other half is black lab) immediately made itself known. For instance, despite being neutered, he displayed unmistakably male appetite with his blanket. That wasn't so bad, but when he tried to do the same thing with my sister's seven-year-old friends, we had more of a problem.
  
  
• More than once, Bear succeeded through barking in diverting us from the kitchen long enough to help himself to our food. Nor were covering, elevation, or a combination of the two enough to keep him from delighting in our garbage.
  
  
• In second grade, my sister was friends with twin girls whom we couldn't stand. Whenever they came over the noise was unbearable, and Dad and I would retreat to the backyard. One time when their father came to pick them up, Bear burst through with his front legs the glass panes in our front door . I'm not sure the twins came over again.
  
  
• My dad loved Bear. In fact, every now and then he would inadvertently call me his name. He always felt terrible, and I might have given him a hard time, but I knew it didn't mean anything.
  
  
• I'm skeptical that Bear felt pain. Whether a baseball to the head or a dashboard to the face, he never seemed to notice anything hit him.
  
  That includes the car accidents. A big Buick rolled down our street at about 25 miles per hour right into poor Bear. He ran off for three hours, but returned wagging his tail and happy.
  
  Another time a large black van hit him going about 40. Two broken legs, a fractured cranium, and a dislocated hip resulted. My parents decided to save him by acquiring $3,500 in credit card debt.
  
  He was basically fine. That was around Halloween, so we said the shuttlecock-shaped thing he wore to keep him from chewing on his cast was an astronaut costume. Thereafter my uncles affectionately called him "Dented Dog."
  
  
• He would chase after our chickens for fun, but never attack them. Rodents weren't so lucky.
  
  The cats bossed him around.
  
  
• Rather than walking him when I got home from school, I used to just let him loose. Apparently there was a female dog down the street that Bear was quite fond of. We discovered this when our neighbor visited on my Dad a large garbage bag. "Girl Scout Cookies?" he asked. Nope. Just poop that Bear had left as a display of affection on their lawn. (You'd think we could have talked before it got to that point.)
  
  
• Bear probably pooped in the house over a hundred times. He knew it made us mad, so he hid it, which caused particular problems on the couple of occasions when he pooped in someone's bed.
  
  
• I remember once when Bear dove down a nearly vertical hillside in pursuit of a hapless groundhog. Seizing it in his jaws, he shook it violently for a few seconds before casually discarding it. With dried blood streaked on his coat, he looked particularly pleased.

All I can say is, now that's a dog.


Why did we love this dog? He ate our food, soiled our house, barked frequently for no reason, required lots of attention, and brought expensive vet bills. On paper he was almost an unqualified detriment to our lives.

Yet all of these recollections are quite fond for me, and I'll bet that despite being freed from spending her lunch hour coming home to walk him, my mom will miss him not a little.

The fact is, he brought color to our lives. Somehow cleaning up after him, walking him, and feeding him, while when taken individually were merely chores, collectively they form part of a relationship with an animal. There's something wonderful about such a creature, so like a person and yet fantastically different.

These things of which I've written are a priceless part of my childhood. Far from being regrettable, they are a badge of uniqueness that I show you with pride.

This was my dog. And as his life was part of mine, so he is part of me.

Bear, Sam, Uncle Rob, with guest appearance by Pennsylvania.

Eric Knight. Maker of good sandwiches.

Where I come from.

I got to see my dad last night.

I had a dream about him for what seems like a couple of hours. It felt soo good to believe like he was around again, like it hadn't been almost five years since he died.

It's hard, having lived so much of my life now without him. I've changed so much since I was 17, he'd hardly know me if we met now. And I begin to forget.

The less of my life he's part of, the more I'm defined independently of him. I lose touch of where I come from and become increasingly defined by where I've been.

I miss my dad.

There is that great hope. In each dream reunion the years without him instantly evaporate for the joy that he is with me now. It is they which seem to be the illusion, the dream which may be forgotten.

Despite waking up, I feel that in this is truth.