1922

Coefficient of relationship

• Sewall Wright showed how to calculate
• the degree of relatedness between two people.
• The coefficient for a parent and child is 1;
• for two unrelated people, 0;
• for a grandparent and grandchild, 0.25;
• for full siblings, 0.5.
• You can use this number to determine
• the degree of inbreeding,
• the degree of kinship for genealogy,
• and Hamilton’s rule of altruism.

Genetic distance

• Several means exist to measure genetic divergence,
• but Wright’s coefficient of relationship is not such a means
• or is at best only an approximation of genetic relatedness
• because a coefficient of relationship
• does not use genetic tests
• and when two living things produce an offspring by meiosis
• each chromosome is taken from only one parent at random.
• This is why siblings are different from each other;
• it’s not half of each parent; it’s random.

Being a Native American poet

• I am a proud card-carrying member
• of a federally recognized tribe;
• however, my father was not an Indian.
• Only a genetic test could determine
• whether all my blood is Indian, like Mom,
• or none of it is, like Dad.
• If I were a Calvinist Indian,
• tribal membership would be like a Boy Scout merit badge;
• I would need to demonstrate a native inheritance.
• I had a friend who said that I was
• not an Native American poet because of what I write about
• but because I am a Native American.