Dear Granny

I think I've already mentioned Bill Bryson's book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything". I found it fascinating. One chapter starts out with a simple mathematical calculation that really took me aback. Here it is:
If your two parents hadn't bonded just when they did - possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond - you wouldn't be here. And if their parents hadn't done likewise, and their parents before them, and so on, obviously and indefinitely, you wouldn't be here.
Push backward through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up. Go back just eight generations to about the time that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born, and already there are over 250 people on whose timely couplings your existence depends. Continue further, to the time of Shakespeare and the Mayflower Pilgrims, and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors earnestly exchanging genetic material in a way that would, eventually and miraculously, result in you.
At twenty generations ago, the number of people procreating on your behalf has risen to 1,048,576. Five generations before that, and there are no fewer than 33,554,432 men and women on whose devoted couplings your existence depends. By thirty generations ago, your total number of forebears - remember, these aren't cousins and aunts and other incidental relatives, but only parents and parents of parents in a line leading ineluctably to you - is over one billion (1,073,741,824, to be precise). If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.
Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that your line is not pure. You couldn't be here without a little incest - actually quite a lot of incest - albeit at a genetically discreet remove. With so many millions of ancestors in your background, there will have been many occasions when a relative from your mother's side of the family procreated with some distant cousin from your father's side of the ledger: In fact, if you are in a partnership now with someone from your own race and country, the chances are excellent that you are at some level related.
Whoa! Granny! Is there something you wanted to tell me?
I'll share more interesting factoids from Bryson's book later.