What do my Great Great Grand Children carry from my Great Great Grand Father?

Question:

What do my Great Great Grand Children carry from my Great Great Grand Father?

This is about DNA and Genetics

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Impossible to say. Statistics and reality are 2 different things. For starters, we don't know if you're male or female and whether we're talking about your father's father's father's father, or your mother's father's mother's father. There's a difference.

A man can pass an X or a Y gene to his child. A woman passes only X genes to her child, but it could be either X. If you are talking about a complete male lineage, and we're talking about you having sons, grandsons, great grandsons and great great grandsons, then they carry your GGGF's Y gene. It's unbroken. But if this is the father of your mother's grandmother...that's not the same. The gene pool is more diluted and there is a statistical chance of your gggchild carrying almost nothing of significance of your gggfather's DNA. There are genes that get so common (like brown eyes) that it's also impossible to tell which ancestor passed that along.

Now by contrast, maternal lines are a little different...all those maternal genes pass a little differently. There's a different kind of DNA strand attached and a little different coding. One of the more interesting studies done on this has to do with 3 sisters from Quebec in the late 1600s were all carriers of a rare, devastating degenerative eye disease. Their descendents were tracked for 20 years in the 1970s-90s to see what kind of changes they had related to this disease. The results were pretty fascinating. First, the sisters had over 800,000 known descendents between them. There were over 40,000 people in Canada and the US identified as descending from all 3 sisters. (Prolific Catholic Profligators!) Of those involved in the study, they had less than a 5% change of getting the disease (DNA came in at the end of the study...something not available at the beginning). Those who descended from all 3 sisters who were involved in the study had no greater chance of getting the disease than anyone else. But the participants were at a slightly greater chance of getting the disease than non-descendents. The issue being, there are SO MANY descendents of the carriers, that there is a larger pool of potential patients than there would be in other countries where so much of the population has a genetic link to known carriers. And even if someone carries a trait, it doesn't mean it pops out.