Trump’s path forward

by Dr Swaggins

In yesterday’s article I outlined some of the importance of Ohio and how the establishment GOP and their donors managed to grab those 66 delegates. In spite of the titanic efforts on behalf of the GOP to win Ohio, it may have gotten them nothing in the long run. As David Wasserman reported on the fivethirtyeight live election blog, “Trump could make up for all 66 delegates he lost in Ohio with huge delegate margins in Illinois and Missouri.” As it turned out, he did win Illinois and he won Missouri as well, by the skin of his teeth: a margin of less than 2000 votes. Those two thousand votes were apparently pretty valuable, since the winner in Missouri is rewarded 12 extra delegates.

The brutal irony of this becomes apparent when you take Nate Silver’s observation (also on the fivethirtyeight blog) into account: “Cruz would be leading Trump in Missouri by about 4 percentage points in a two-way race,” which I suppose is a polite way of saying that Cruz would’ve won that state and at least twelve more delegates were it not for Kasich. This means that if we were to consider the Ohio strategy purely as a numbers game, it has already backfired to the tune of at least 18% of what they’ve worked so hard to win.

It is also possible that certain machinations in Illinois backfired. Trump won 39% of the vote when he was expected to win 33% as of March 7. A possible explanation for this is given by a couple of analysts on Trump’s payroll, who told him that his numbers would go up after the Soros-funded assault on his rally attendees. Trump won 42 more delegates in Illinois than Cruz did.

The upshot of this is that Trump fans can celebrate the incompetence of the people trying to stop their man from getting into the White House. So far, these people are giving Trump nearly as much as they’re taking away from him. (This is why I scratch my head whenever someone says that SJWs are going to take over the world: SJWs are so stupid that they can only win when the game is wildly rigged in their favor, and the people organizing the SJWs have as little idea what they’re doing as their pawns do; Bernie is these people’s best chance of gaining the ridiculous amounts of power they want, and he’s going to lose because he shares their stupidity.)

The popcorn worthy display of neocons and offbrand Marxists repeatedly shooting themselves in their feet may be an amusing thing to talk about, but what remain at the end of the day are the numbers: Trump needs 564 more delegates to stave off the oligarchy’s attempts to strip him of the nomination. That’s 53%. According to a new poll by The Economist and YouGov, that happens to be Trump’s popular support among Republican voters.

Even if his numbers were less than 53% in truth, or if some of his supporters left in spite of their general loyalty, he would still have a solid chance. Many of the states that remain are winner take all or have a hybrid system of one form or another, which generally benefits the front runner, and he’s expected to do well in a collection of upcoming states, all of which are either WTA or use a hybrid system.

Lastly, his only significant opponent still in the game is totally unprepared for him. Cruz’s biggest demographics are conservatives and evangelicals, which generally means “Bible bangers from the South,” and he already lost the entire American Southeast to Trump. Cruz can’t scoop up more of the anti establishment vote than Trump can, and much of the support he might get from pro establishment voters will be soaked up by Kasich, likely leading to another Missouri situation and even more delegates for Donald Trump.

Trump’s strategy now is probably to sweep up those states that Roger Stone mentioned in the article I linked above, for the delegates and perhaps even more so to crush the remaining momentum of Cruz’s campaign. After that, the single greatest event in American political history is going to take place: Donald Trump is going to humiliate, excoriate, expose, and sap all of the hope out of Hillary Clinton in a heretofore uncharted level of Stumping. It’ll be a delicious form of karma for Clinton, it’ll be the biggest theater of the political war between the American people and their oligarchs to date, and I predict that it’ll be the finest work that Trump has ever done, a veritable magnum opus in his career of making other people look like incompetent, clownish fools.

More so than any other political aspirant in recent history, Donald Trump’s ascension has been an incredible spectacle to behold. He beat Jeb Bush and his $80 million, he’s beating all of the GOP establishment figures from my last article, and he may confront and even trounce the Democratic party, including Clinton, Soros, and a massive horde of SJW goons. I don’t know about you guys, but I really want to see this happen.

Trump vs the Neocons: the Battle of Ohio

by Dr Swaggins

The intense political warfare between Donald Trump and the Neoconservative establishment has been an equally fascinating and infuriating thing to watch. Although Mitt Romney’s recent anti Trump speech was hilariously ineffective at convincing GOP voters to support their establishment masters, it included a GOP power play for a brokered convention. For all you normies wondering why Kasich, the fourth banana and a nonfactor thus far, was able to win Ohio on the same night that Rubio suffered a brutal loss (19% difference) in his home state, this article is your introduction to the biggest and most successful attempt by the establishment to stop Donald Trump.

Seeing that Trump was overwhelmingly favored to win Florida, Romney and other establishment figures set their sights on Ohio, with the intention of taking away enough delegates from Trump that he wouldn’t be able to reach the delegate count necessary to secure the nomination in the first round of voting; in the second round of voting, the unpledged delegates (all of them Republican politicians) may give Cruz the number of delegates he needs to defeat Trump and take the nomination.

Winning Ohio, in turn, would take a lot of big names, money, man hours, and connections:

• A candidate with a solid chance of beating Trump in the form of Ohio’s current governor, John Kasich.
• An organization capable of counteracting Trump’s ability to manipulate the media in the form of the specifically anti-Trump Our Principles PAC. The idea is to get a bunch of rich guys like Paul Singer, the Ricketts family, and Meg Whitman (the CEO of Hewlett Packard, which itself profits from outsourcing, a practice that Trump aims to stop) to help pay for anti Trump ads. Ironically- and hypocritically- these include jabs relating to Trump’s own history of outsourcing. If they’re going to criticize him for having done something that their biggest donors do all the time, it would appear that their “Principles” boil down to 1) fuck Donald Trump, 2) fuck Donald Trump, and 3) fuck Donald Trump, in no particular order.
• An endorsement from another big Ohioan, in this case John Boehner.
• Extra support from good old Mittens himself.
• A lack of competition with fellow neocons. Had Rubio or Cruz aggressively campaigned in Iowa it would have split the neocon vote and skewed the odds in favor of Trump. Of course, that’s not what actually happened. Yes, these guys who are supposed to be rivals are literally teaming up on the big guy.

If you asked the average American what voting was about, they’d tell you it was about picking leaders. To these establishment types, it looks more like an investment. The Our (nonexistent) Principles PAC’s pitch to these billionaires even sounds like a sales pitch complete with promises that they’re going to get bang for their buck: “They stressed its extensive work against Trump in Iowa, the one state he has failed to win.” To give an impression of how rich and powerful some of these people are, Paul Singer is the head honcho of a firm that has attempted to repo the assets of a G20 nation. To some degree they’ve succeeded. Instead of a personal income, this guy earns the equivalent of a small GDP every year, and he’s not the only anti-Trump donor to whom that description could apply. All of them are trying to use this power to stir the pot until someone other than Trump settles at the top. To use the example of Singer again, his support for Rubio most likely stemmed from the fact that Rubio is someone from whom he likely had much to gain- at the taxpayer’s expense, naturally.

Ordinary Americans want to live in a real nation: real borders, real law enforcement, real protection from an unfair globalist economy, and a real economy of our own with healthy industries of our own, all of which the establishment seems to gain nothing from, and much of which they’ve been actively opposing. All we want is to do good, honest work, go home to our families, and enjoy what little time we have with them before we shuffle off this mortal coil. With the exception of the mathematically challenged folks supporting Bernie, we don’t ask for much.

Meanwhile, there’s a cabal of billionaires and politicians endlessly scheming and conspiring, continually stacking the deck in their own favor, compulsively clutching to as much power over our society as they can possibly hold. For all of Trump’s victories today, these sociopaths won the Battle of Ohio, and they will not stop conspiring to place one of their hand picked candidates in the office of President.

The mustard seed of faith that I have in such a cancerous system will be planted in the form of a vote for Donald Trump.

As for Rubio, and his big money backers like Paul Singer and Norman Braman? Thanks for coming out.

On the Neural Basis of Political Belief

by Dr Swaggins

Alt-rightists, neoreactionaries and so on pride themselves for dismissing vapid attributions of every known human phenomenon to culture. The most well known examples of this are the understandings that cognitive and behavioral differences between the races and sexes are the inevitable result of biological differences between the races and sexes. However, the neural basis for political belief is a topic that often slips under the radar in spite of its importance.

The clearest neural differences between liberals and conservatives are the amount of grey matter and neural activity in two brain structures, the anterior cingulate gyrus and the amygdala. In a 2011 study by Kanai, Feilden, Firth, and Rees, structural MRI scans and a political attitude test were used to determine that liberals typically had more grey matter in the anterior cingulate, but conservatives typically had more grey matter in the right amygdala. The authors also conjecture that since “one of the functions of the anterior cingulate cortex is to monitor uncertainty [16 and 17] and conflicts [18]… it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views.” My (admittedly biased) conjecture as to how this works is that liberals simply have higher tolerance for inconsistent beliefs, but the implications of a bigger anterior cingulate aren’t clear, as “the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) monitors for processing or response conflict and recruits dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) to resolve these conflicts.” This means that the anterior cingulate may be more of a relay station than anything else.

The amygdala, however, is better understood. A thoroughly studied structure, the amygdala is well known for its association with fear and other phenomena such as long term memory. Be it a rat whose amygdalas were destroyed with a scalpel, a mouse whose amygdalas were destroyed using a localized electrical shock, or even humans whose amygdalas were destroyed by a rare disease, it’s been thoroughly shown that most fear responses won’t happen without the amygdala. Rats without functioning amygdalas won’t even respond to simulated predation. Someone with insufficient amygdala activity will not respond to potential threats, and someone with a hyperactive amygdala may end up paranoid.

It should come as no surprise, then, that conservatives with their well-endowed amygdalas show greater responses to negative stimuli including “disgust, fear, and anger.” Examples of this likely include “disgust arousal at homosexuality [being] connected with opposition to gay marriage,” “fear of crime [being connected] to… advocacy of strict policing,” and “anger system activation for crimes already committed [being connected] to… advocacy of harsh punishment.”

Scientists have nailed down political beliefs as an at least partially biological phenomenon instead of an entirely cultural one. Liberal newspapers often report these differences as a negativity bias on the conservatives’ part without mentioning that these studies have generally only used negative stimuli, which could give a false impression that conservatives have high negativity bias even though they may simply make stronger value judgments in general. Moreover, reports on this topic occasionally go so far as to portray conservatives as pathologically paranoid fear mongers.

Naturally, such claims ignore the fact that an organism is supposed to be fit in its environment. The fact that we have both conservatives and liberals means that both phenotypes (or underlying genotypes; a four repeat allele of the DRD4 gene has been shown to correlate with conservatism and identical twins raised apart generally share political beliefs) have helped our survival at some point. If one of these two phenotypes were less fit than the other, this would mean one of two things:

1. We’re living in a potential multicultural paradise wherein different groups pose no significant threat to one another’s safety or prosperity, and to be concerned with an incalculably massive horde of illegals effortlessly crossing our southern border, rapists migrating to Europe and so on is tantamount to basing one’s worldview off of paranoid delusions, or
2. There are people out there who outright lack the mental hardware necessary to understand these threats even after hearing about the Rape of Cologne, the Paris shootings, the San Bernardino shooting, the Boston bombings, the Rotherham rape ring, the attempted bombing at Hanover, and the Chattanooga shooting.

As I said earlier, liberals must have had their uses in the past. Indeed, while the 4-repeat allele of DRD4 correlates with conservatism, the 7-repeat copy correlates with both liberalism and personality traits which might benefit nomadic populations. There may be a time in the future when a liberal prevents us from getting into an unnecessary war or something, and I certainly wish they would actually get out and protest our absurd meddling in the Middle East. That said, if our side is correct in believing that these economic migrants passing into Europe pose a serious threat to the well being of ethnic Europeans, then it would seem as if the liberals who support mass immigration are biologically unfit. You won’t find a conservative mind behind absurdities such as attempting to politely request migrants to not rape your country’s women.

Fortunately, these traits are not entirely predicated on genetic differences, and therefore people’s views are liable to change. What a coincidence that Breitbart is reporting increased pepper spray sales on January 8th and Reuters is reporting nationalist protests and the growth of PEDIGA on January 9th. Notice that the population becomes more conservative when it has more reasons to be concerned, enraged, or outright afraid; while there are certainly genetic components that determine how prone someone is to conservatism, the perception of an outside threat seems to trigger conservatism as a response to danger. Perhaps we can imagine conservatism, and even more so nationalism, as a little voice in your amygdala which says, “Oh, crap, looks like we have to go fight for our civilization.” The liberals’ various schemes to scrub away this mechanism with accusations of racism might end up as an even bigger failure than their genius plans to beg migrants not to rape. You can take over the government, media, education and so on, but you can’t negotiate with conserved neural pathways.

Liberals have spent trillions of dollars attempting to improve blacks, but nothing changed due to the inevitability that biological differences will manifest as cognitive and behavioral differences. What do you think their odds are of convincing Europeans to watch their culture die in spite of the Europeans’ brains being structured in such a way as to achieve the opposite result?

Eyferth the Cat

by Dr Swaggins

Earlier today a friend of mine, the venerable Eagleshigh, posted an article about the black/White IQ gap which aggravated me to the point of actually writing a blog post to do away with that unkillable cat we politely call the Eyferth Study once and for all.

To give a little context for the uninitiated, the Eyferth study compared the average IQs of German children fathered by Allied soldiers during WWII. The results- trumpeted around the world, of course- were that the half black children scored an average of 96.5, a statistically insignificant difference from the White children’s score of 97.2. About half a century later, nobody has replicated this study’s results, and hereditarians have refuted its conclusion so thoroughly that Eyferth’s credibility should appear to have been run through a meat grinder. Yet the liberal news rags repeatedly celebrate the study’s apparent conclusion the world over, as if the scientific method simply doesn’t require replication of an experiment’s results anymore as long as the results are adequately pleasant. Put simply, Eyferth is the cat the keeps coming back.

Fortunately, with cats who keep coming back, there are multiple ways to skin them.

I’ll do away with the first of its nine lives by repeating Jensen’s observation in his 1998 book The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability that the black GIs involved had all been selected for intelligence beforehand; those blacks with the lowest IQs, the bottom 30% of their population in this respect, were rejected from the military.

A hereditarian can use this datum alone to do some thorough skinning. Since the overwhelming majority of American GIs at the time were draftees, they should make a pretty good approximation of the black population as a whole in terms of IQ; I’d be willing to wager that the blacks called up for the draft back then averaged an IQ of 85 since draftees were chosen for their age and sex alone (neither of which affect IQ enough to skew our mean significantly). If you send the bottom 30% back home, you’ve truncated the left flank of your normal curve clean off! I used the trapezoidal method of integration to approximate the average IQ of those blacks remaining after the bottom 30% were sent home and came up with a result of 92.

Hilariously, if these men were to beget children by women with an average IQ of 100, the expected average IQ of the offspring would be around 96, or perhaps a hair higher due to maternal IQ being a slightly better predictor of a child’s IQ than paternal IQ. 96.5, maybe? Taking paternal IQ estimates into account, the Eyferth results were as consistent with the hereditarian model as with the egalitarian model- perhaps even more so!

I wish I could say that the study was only inaccurate to that extent. Unfortunately, I have more work to do. As Rushton and Jensen pointed out in their 2005 review article Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability, 20-25% of the fathers of the Eyferth study were not even black Americans, but rather French North Africans. Since Algeria constitutes most of that territory (and is statistically representative of it as I’ll outline later) I’ll discuss the possibility of Algerians making up 20% or so of the Eyferth fathers. Richard Lynn found the Algerian average IQ at 83, but some of that relative deficit is due to Algeria’s high consanguinity rate. Still more of it may be attributed to Algeria’s mixed record as it relates to nutrition; UNICEF reports that in 1995, 92% of Algerian children had adequate dietary iodine, but by 2005 that figure had dropped to 61%. The 83 average IQ figure was taken in 2002, temporally closer to the 61% iodine adequacy figure than the 92% figure. Also, I’ll justify using Algerians as representative of French North Africa as a whole by pointing out that the other two countries have roughly the same consanguinity rates, that Lynn found Tunisia and Morocco’s average IQs to be 83 and 84 respectively, and that the UNICEF report I linked above found Morocco’s iodine deficiency rate to be within two percentage points of Algeria’s. Furthermore, all three countries are nearly entirely composed of Arabized Berbers. For these reasons, all three countries most likely have about the same genetic IQs.

We have little clue as to what effect the presence of these Algerians, Tunisians, and/or Moroccans would have specifically, although we certainly know that tossing in Berber caucasoids with the “black” sample constitutes an instance of flagrant intellectual dishonesty. I’ll posit that since first cousin marriages drop the offspring’s IQ by up to 10 points on average, we can estimate that those 22-25% inbred Algerians are around 10 points duller than their peers. Assuming that the inbred and outbred Algerians together have an average IQ consistent with Lynn’s figure of 83, algebra would have us believe that the inbred Algerians would score about 75 on average and their peers about 85; I’ll round up to 90 under the assumption that North African nutrition prior to the 1940s wasn’t stellar, because that would affect their IQ but not the IQ of their children.

How many of these French North African soldiers were inbred? To what extent would outbreeding correct this deficit? I doubt we have any way of knowing. Regardless, having 20% or more of the “black” fathers actually be caucasoids with genetic IQs we can at best estimate should’ve been enough to have the study thrown out in the first place because a fifth or more of the data had literally nothing to do with the hypothesis.

I’ve killed Eyferth twice now. For my third refutation I will point out that the girls in the White sample were for whatever reason duller than the White average, at a sample average of 93. This is obviously a sampling error; it couldn’t be attributed to a high frequency of low IQ White fathers because the mentally deficient Whites had also been truncated, and furthermore because the White male children had normal IQs. It’s worth noting that if the White daughters weren’t missing half a standard deviation’s worth of IQ points, the White children would’ve been four points brighter on average, which is consistent with my first point.

My fourth point is also very indicting: the study occurred when all of these individuals were children, and heritability of IQ actually raises over time. If there were a difference in intelligence in spite of the myriad of problems I mentioned above, it likely wouldn’t even show up by that point, as the average age of the children being tested was 10. What little gap they allowed to exist within the design of the study was obfuscated by taking the data before they were ready.

My fifth point will be that the IQ of the parents was never tested. We could begin to interpret the data concerning North African IQ or the bizarre loss of 7 IQ points seen in the daughters if we had the necessary data, but we don’t.

My sixth will be that we have literally no idea how, specifically, these children were conceived. If they were conceived by prostitution or rape, then assortative mating most likely did not play a hand in the conception. In this case, the average IQ of the mothers could be 100 or even 107 if we’re to believe Lynn’s figure for German IQ. If the child’s IQ is about halfway between the mother and father’s then the fathers’ IQ would be expected to be about as far beneath the children’s IQ as the mothers’ were above them, which would be consistent with my 92 estimate; if the children were generally conceived consensually then we would see this effect less often due to assortative mating. Points 5 and 6 boil down to lacking any knowledge of a myriad of possible tertiary variables to account for. It’s just poor experimental design.

My seventh refutation will be to point out that these results have never been successfully repeated. A crucial step of the scientific process is to have somebody else use the same methods you did to produce the same result so that we know it wasn’t a fluke. Data are not typically considered valid until they’ve been corroborated, and the fact that egalitarians are latching onto a severely flawed study in spite of its uncorroborated results shows an extreme level of bias on their part.

My eighth refutation will be to point out that among African fathers, the sample specifically uses African American fathers, who genetically are roughly 20% White on average. It is possible that if the children were 50% black instead of 40% black (or less thanks to the North Africans in the sample), a slightly greater difference would be observed. Lynn gives 67 for the average of all African countries, and 80 for African Americans with no European admixture. I could certainly imagine better nutrition  and a lower parasite load tacking on 13 IQ points. And I could imagine Africans with a fifth or more White genetics having closed a quarter of the IQ gap. The closest populations I can find to the theoretical model of a purely black population living with good nutrition and so on are South African blacks (adequate dietary iodine and 77 average IQ) and British blacks (average IQ heavily bottlenecked to 92). It is possible that had the fathers been fully black, a greater difference would have been observed.

All in all we have a population of Africans likely bred to higher intelligence via White admixture, with its bottom 30% excised, with some caucasoids thrown in, bred again with White mothers to cut the remaining IQ difference in half, and then tested before heritability takes its full effect, against a nonrepresentative sample of Whites. On the whole, the fathers should have had about 36% caucasoid DNA and the mothers should have had nearly 100%, with the children being 68% genetically caucasoid. What stupidity they could have inherited from their 32% African heritage was truncated away, obfuscated by being tested before it should have appeared, and compared against a slightly dull population of Whites.

Perhaps I could drum up another refutation if I had a mind to. Jensen claims that the higher IQ could have been due to heterosis, but the mixed race IQ data sets I’ve seen show no evidence that hybrid vigor is common in such situations.

That said, I don’t see the point in trying any more than I already have. Egalitarianism is the absurd belief that over 100,000 years, in wildly varying environments, and during massive introgression events, the brain will not change at all, in spite of being an inconceivably complex, highly energy expensive, and superlatively important organ. It violates everything we know about evolution and it’s been refuted to oblivion and beyond, but after all this time you still have academics like Flynn desperately clinging to mutilated data in order to support it.

Bad ideas are often case studies in bias, because the only reason anybody believes them is that they want to. That’s why they refuse to go away- that is, until a bunch of people turn around, open their eyes, and say those magic words:

“Galileo was right all along.”

Fecundity is Immortality

by Dr. Swaggins

Ladies and gentlemen of Coontown, I have decided to go a little bit off of the beaten path.

The inaugural post of Coontown’s very own racial science blog will not, in fact, be dedicated to disproving a recent origin out of Africa, affirming the heritability of IQ, or even highlighting the often drastically different reproductive habits of negroids and non negroids. Rather, I have a more ambitious goal in mind: I’m going to convince at least one of you to breed a small army of children.

As a student of the life sciences, I occasionally distill people all the way down to what genes they might have and how those will be expressed in a given situation, almost regarding human beings as the sum total of the chemical reactions that occur in each of their cells. I may be guilty of losing the forest for the trees, but I think it’s beautiful to see the traits I cherish in loved ones go on, copied base pair for base pair, in their descendants. As my older relatives get ready to make their exit from this world, I see younger relatives stepping boldly into the world, and I cannot help but notice that many of the traits I loved about my grandparents, aunts, and uncles are not dying with them. We’ve known for around thirty years now that these personality traits have a heavy genetic basis, as do IQ and physical appearance to no one’s surprise, and I encourage anyone curious about this topic to look into the Minnesota Twin Family Study and its associated studies. The gene is passed, and therefore the trait is passed, and therefore that part of that person outlived the person themselves, walking the Earth alive and well in the body of another.

I’ve seen people talk about how valuable family is, and how much their heritage matters to them. It should be fairly obvious that mating is how we pass our genes on, but I’m going to go into more detail; I’m going to quantify much of the value of family by arguing that family is how you can pass on the overwhelming majority of all your tendencies, capabilities, and other traits, dying only in physical form while the people you love most carry the torch of all those things which made you, you.

In the quest for genetic immortality, you run into an apparent roadblock in the limits of your own ability to breed. With each child you have, you pass on half of your genes, but you can’t have two kids and call it good: each child possesses a randomly selected half of your genome, meaning that after two children, you’ve successfully passed on around 75% of your genome. At three you’re 87.5% successful, and at four, you’re 93.75% successful. I take it you’re noticing the diminishing returns?

You’re probably not going to get upwards of 99% on your own, which requires seven children. Who said you needed to go it alone, though?

Siblings are 50% genetically identical on average. Imagine deciding which genes your younger brother might inherit from your father by coin toss: you have 23 quarters representing your own genome laid out in a row. Heads means that you got your paternal grandfather’s copy of that particular chromosome; tails means you got your paternal grandmother’s copy of the same chromosome. If you have heads for the first toss (Grandpa’s chromosome 1), your little brother has a 50% chance of getting the same result you did. Now, repeat this 22 more times to determine his genetic inheritance from Dad, and do this 23 times for Mom’s genome as well. In these 46 coin tosses, about 23 will be the same as yours and 23 different.

Now imagine that before inheriting your paternal grandfather’s chromosome 1, some of grandma’s genes hopped onto it by a process called recombination. Whenever you have heads, it’s part tails, and whenever you have tails, it’s part heads. This means that even when you get a different coin toss result, there will still be some similarity, because that chunk of tails in your heads resembles your brother’s tails and that chunk of heads in his tails resembles your heads. It sounds like a very complicated version of a Reese’s commercial, but the end result is that your siblings are almost always going to be pretty close to 50% genetically identical to you.

That identical 50% of your sibling’s genome will be inherited randomly as well, half on average to each child. Should a sibling of yours have four children, an estimated 87.5% of that 50% will be passed on, for 43.75%. Better yet, if you have two siblings and each has two children, that’s two random sets of 37.5%, with the estimate climbing to 60.94%. And since your own gene transmission is equally random, your siblings will be passing along some of YOUR genes you didn’t manage to pass. Let’s say you had three children; your 87.5% estimate has gone up to 95.12%.

The final part of my calculation will be to include your first cousins, who on average have an eighth of your genome each, and will randomly transmit one half of that every time they have children of their own. I’m not including second cousins because they carry about 1/32nd of your genome and you’re likely never to meet them. Even with first cousins, however, I should note that if two of your first cousins are siblings then their contribution to your genetic immortality will be somewhat redundant due to the fact that the genes they share with you both derive from the same person.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, for the moment you’ve all been waiting for: what percentage of your genes is passed on based on the number of kids, nieces and nephews, and first cousins once removed you have? This can be calculated on a relative by relative basis:

(0.5)^n, with n being the number of kids you have, is the proportion of your genes you didn’t pass on. For a given sibling, 1- (0.5 x (1-(0.5)^n)) is the proportion of your genes they didn’t pass on. For a given first cousin, 1- (0.125 x (1-(0.5)^n)) is the proportion of your genes they didn’t pass on. Taking all these values for you, your siblings, and all your first cousins, multiplying them together, subtracting that value from 1, and multiplying by 100 will give you an estimate for the percentage of your own genome that has been passed on. For a more precise estimate, you have to account for the fact that your paternal first cousins only have access to your paternally derived genes and your maternal first cousins only have access to your maternally derived genes. In extreme cases, such as my girlfriend (thirty cousins on her mother’s side, zero on her dad’s), the percentage of her DNA passed on by her first cousins will approach 50% instead of 100%, but that 50% of her genome is going to be found in a lot of people.

This method of approximating the proportion of your genes passed to the next generation is just that: an approximation. We would need an obnoxiously detailed equation to account for the redundancy of your cousins who are siblings passing on chunks of the same 25% of your DNA that your aunt or uncle will share; that, or we’d treat your aunts and uncles as passing on their 25% instead of your first cousins passing on their 12.5%. That would work mathematically, but I’m encouraging people to have babies today, not two decades ago.

If both sets of your grandparents, their children, and their grandchildren have three children each, you will have two siblings and twelve first cousins. You and both of your siblings will see about 99.0% of your DNA copied letter for letter within your family, without accounting for the fact that assortative mating will drive this figure upwards, particularly among coethnics, and the fact that you have an even split of maternal and paternal first cousins in this scenario.

It’s disturbing to think of slipping away from this world, not knowing what will happen next. Still, if you pass on your work, ideas, values, culture, and the overwhelming majority of your genetics, the only part of you that is lost will be your consciousness- your ability to experience the future of your work, ideas, values, culture, and genes as they’re passed down in your family. With the passage of time, old minds are wiped away into nothingness and new ones grow, made from the same stuff as their elders were; the tapestry of an unbroken line never stretches or tears, only ever renewing itself as the same threads are continually re-woven in our chromosomes. You are an extension of your family, and your family is an extension of you. Family is how we pass on everything we are and everything we value.

Your family has probably given you so much over the course of your life. Give back to them. Strengthen them, care for them, breed more of them, and support them in their trials and endeavors.

It is exactly as Shakespeare said: “the world must be peopled!”