Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Coming from the South where genealogy is taken seriously (with blue-haired matriarchs on both sides of the family eager to trace roots back to Tudor England), Dawn learned early in life how to determine extended family relations: if you share a parent, you're siblings; if you share a grandparent, you're cousins; sharing a great-grandparent makes you second cousins, and so forth. If someone shares a grandparent with one of your parents, you're first cousins "once removed"; similarly, if someone shares a great-grandparent with your grandparent, you're second cousins "twice removed" and so on.

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Just a bit of understanding of exponential math makes clear, thus, that any two neighbors are some sort of cousins; indeed, everyone on the planet is your cousin, even be it "twenty-third cousins, eight times removed."

In a recent chat, Dawn's niece revealed that she was one of only three in her high school biology class to believe in evolution. (She goes to school in Nashville, Tennessee.) Dawn gave her the above spiel about determining cousinage, and then pointed out that given that humans and chimps share common ancestors, we are all cousins to every chimp on the planet. And given that all animals share common ancestry, every toad and housefly counts as a cousin, too. And for that matter, since all life stems from one source, we are-- literally-- cousins to any given cabbage, umpteenbillionth and a zillion times removed... but still true cousins. Dawn was pleased to send her back to her biology class with this insight, and glad to hear that she'd floated the idea with her Bible-bound classmates.

A worldview that makes us real family with all living things seems a far grander view of life than any creation myth could hope to be.