This blog reflects me playing with a pet toy, trying to integrate strands from dissimilar themes:
Eleanor (Chapter 1): “The many bends along the highroad of my life conceal the vistas between this fleeting moment of pure being and ancient recollections coursing like deerhounds through my brains. In a life of fourscore years and more, who can look so far back? So many rivers crossed; too many days. The very richness of experience crowds and clouds the brains.”
Pure science: The “Most Recent Common Ancestor” (MRCA) formula detects the most likely past generation from which two individuals derive a single common ancestor. Thus, MRCA detects the earliest genetic memory of diverging kinship.
Eleanor: “Whole years are banished. Other memories have stamped themselves into my mind as if they were illuminations, painted for posterity upon the wind-whipped pages of a book: now seen, now gone again. Memory can be a stranger in its own house. Or do I mean estranged from its own house? I struggle to recall the crucial things, while trivia come clothed in gilt and shining colours and the fashions of the day.”
Pure science: Calculating MRCA depends on determining mutation rates per generation. This value, the Mutation Constant, is the rate at which a mutation shows up at a specific locus between a father and his son.
Eleanor: “Do all one’s memories speak truth? Some must be wishes masked as recollections, borne as fact upon the current of old time. The loneliness of age bestows one singular advantage: no mortal body from my generation lives to contradict what I shall say.”