Post
by dande48 » 25 Aug 2017, 14:57
I got my undergrad in Genetics; It's one of my favorite subjects. There was another case we studied, which yours reminded me of, where a woman got a genetic test, and said she was not the mother of her two boys. If the husband wasn't the father of the kids, we all can safely guess what happened, but the mother? Turns out, she's one of the first recorded cases of a human chimera. She had a twin, which she half-absorbed in the womb. Now, half of her DNA doesn't match the other half. The saliva where they took the test from was genetically from a different person than her ovaries. Pretty cool, huh?
I know they've been trying to see if JS had any children with his polygammous wives for years, but nothing has come back conclusive. They can tell where two individuals share a most-recent-common ancestor, and it is very easy to trace both the paternal/maternal lines. But it becomes tricky the more convoluted the lines become with genders (i.e. the son of the daughter of the son...), especially when the line gets longer.
I'd be interested to see if anything else turns up... maybe a kid of Fanny Alger. I think JS was as "safe" as could be with his wives, outside of Fanny.
"The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. "
-Albert Campus
"Even though there are no ways of knowing for sure, there are ways of knowing for pretty sure."
-Lemony Snicket