Are We All Related

I love my fellow man!  Maybe it’s because we are all family.  Did you know that we are all at least 50th cousins?  This can be explained by the idea of pedigree collapse.  You can read more about it here – Pedigree Collapse  and here – The Straight Dope.

What I take away from that is 2 things…

1 – Since we are all related, we should treat each other like family.  The next time you see a stranger, think of them as a distant cousin and your demeanor will change towards them.   Feeling irritated towards someone?   Think of them as that annoying cousin, but you still love them and treat them with kindness.  It changes your whole outlook on strangers.  We are all family.

2 – You have kissed, and done other things I will not speak of with a distant cousin… You creep!

This is a great video explaining why and how we are all at least 50th cousins.

And then Vsauce does his normal thing and goes off on a tangent.

Some cool notes from his video:

Your body contains as many bacteria as it does it’s own cells (Nature).  So are you your cells or your bacteria?  Or both?  NY Times –  We are our bacteria

Every atom in your body is replaced about every 5 years.  This means that you are a completely different person, physically, than you were 5 years ago.

Our bodies contain more atoms than there are stars in the know universe.  Needless to say, that’s a huge number…  How much is a billion atoms? Let’s put it this way… If you counted 1 number per second, it would take 12 days to count to 1 million.  How long does it take to  count to a billion? 32 years. A billion is huge!

One billion atoms in your body used to belong to Mozart, Buddha, Einstein, etc.   Wow…

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