Okay, first off, I'm talking about Game Of Thrones, so ignore the ickyness of the premise, and just go with it.
So, there's a character called Craster who has something of a unique living arrangement. He started off with a wife. His wife got pregnant several times over. He killed the male children, but raised the female children until they were of childbearing age and then proceeded to have children with them, too. Same deal with those children, and the same deal again with their children, and so on.
Now, I know that these percentages aren't exactly exact, but they're close enough for jazz.
So, his first set of daughters would have 50% of his DNA, and 50% of his wife's DNA. His granddaughters would have 50% of his DNA and 50% of his daughter's DNA, meaning they would have 75% of his DNA. And so on and on, with the percentage of his DNA getting larger and larger.
In maths, you could repeat that process indefinitely without reaching 100%. However, DNA is only divisible by so much as there are roughly 3b base pairs. So, assuming Craster was immortal, continued his living arrangements for a very long time, and the excessive inbreeding didn't lead to no offspring who could bear his children, there should theoretically reach a point where his breeding partners had the same DNA as him bar the Y chromosome and, at that point, it should be possible for one of them to have a male child which has identical DNA to him.
That's something that occurred to me today, anyway but, while I know the basics (or, at least, I think I do), I don't know enough about biology to know if this is patently ridiculous - longevity, lack of defects which would make offspring unable to breed, etc. aside. So, leaving aside those kind of practical problems, am I right that it would be possible for him to have a child who is genetically identical to him?
So, there's a character called Craster who has something of a unique living arrangement. He started off with a wife. His wife got pregnant several times over. He killed the male children, but raised the female children until they were of childbearing age and then proceeded to have children with them, too. Same deal with those children, and the same deal again with their children, and so on.
Now, I know that these percentages aren't exactly exact, but they're close enough for jazz.
So, his first set of daughters would have 50% of his DNA, and 50% of his wife's DNA. His granddaughters would have 50% of his DNA and 50% of his daughter's DNA, meaning they would have 75% of his DNA. And so on and on, with the percentage of his DNA getting larger and larger.
In maths, you could repeat that process indefinitely without reaching 100%. However, DNA is only divisible by so much as there are roughly 3b base pairs. So, assuming Craster was immortal, continued his living arrangements for a very long time, and the excessive inbreeding didn't lead to no offspring who could bear his children, there should theoretically reach a point where his breeding partners had the same DNA as him bar the Y chromosome and, at that point, it should be possible for one of them to have a male child which has identical DNA to him.
That's something that occurred to me today, anyway but, while I know the basics (or, at least, I think I do), I don't know enough about biology to know if this is patently ridiculous - longevity, lack of defects which would make offspring unable to breed, etc. aside. So, leaving aside those kind of practical problems, am I right that it would be possible for him to have a child who is genetically identical to him?
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