MSNBC had an interesting headline this morning: "Researchers find remarkable family connections for the candidates" (link). Namely, Barack Obama and Brad Pitt are ninth cousins, and Hillary Clinton and Angelina Jolie are ninth cousins, twice removed. That all the major news networks are going crazy over this is nothing short of ludicrous.
Let's do the math. If each of your parents have two siblings, and each sibling has four children, you will have 16 first cousins, 64 second cousins, 128 third cousins, and so forth, ending up with 1,048,576 ninth cousins. You will have 17,891,328 ninth cousins, twice removed (number of ninth cousins + number of children in seventh generation + number of children in eleventh generation). These numbers are astounding! For reference, the population of New York State was 19,306,183 in 2006 (US Census Bureau).
Remarkable family connections? Hardly.
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