Tag: Game of Thrones

Jon Snow + Daenerys Targaryen far creepier genetically than you know

Posted on by Razib Khan
Screenshot 2016-06-14 22.09.51
Credit: poly-m (deviantART)

If you have been following you have been noticing that there is a brewing romance between Jon Snow, King in the North, and Daenerys Targaryen, the aspiring claimant to her father’s Iron Throne.

Of course there is a twist to all of this: unbenknownst to either, Jon Snow’s biological father is Daenerys’ dead brother, Rhaegar. This means that Daenerys is Jon Snow’s aunt.

Long-time followers of the world of  are aware that incest between near relations is neither unknown nor shocking. But there is a non-trivial detail which it is important to note. Jon and Daenerys are far more closely related than typical aunts and nephews.

The reason is simple, Daenerys and her brother were the products of two generations of sibling incest. Incest results in inbreeding, and inbreeding as you know results in loss of genetic diversity. By Daenerys’ generation the coefficient of relationship between herself and her brothers was much higher than normal.

To be concrete, the coefficient of relationship of full-siblings is 0.50. That of half-siblings 0.25. Identical twins? Obviously 1.0. Another way to think about this is how much of the genome do any two pairs of individuals share in terms of long tracts of inheritance from recent ancestors. On the whole siblings share about half of their genomes in such a fashion. After two generations of inbreeding Daenerys and Rhaegar have a coefficient of relationship of 0.727 (using Wright’s method). They’re not identical twins, obviously, but their genetic relationship is far closer than full-siblings!

Don’t let the mother of dragons ride you Jon!

Dividing  this in half gives 0.36 as the coefficient of relationship between Jon and Daenerys, as opposed to 0.50 for full-siblings and 0.25 for a conventional aunt-nephew. Jon and Daenerys have almost the same genetic relationship as 3/4 siblings; two individuals who share a common parent, like half-siblings, but whose unshared parents are first order relatives (full-siblings or parent-child).

Not Jaime & Cersei creepy, but still creepy.

Addendum: Though Daenerys is quite inbred, Jon is not at all. One generation of outbreeding can eliminate all inbreeding.

The past was not PG

Posted on by Razib Khan

The Week has published a screed against the low moral quality of , Game of Thrones is bad — and bad for you. Obviously there is something to this insofar as one can see a coarsening of entertainment, or at least a decline in the stylized aspects of the depiction of reality.

But one of my initial reactions is that much of the narrative that we value from the past was not particularly PG. If you read you see that the “Good Book”, in fact the only book many read front to back by many after the Reformation in Protestant Europe, has some quite unsavory tales. The story of Judah and Tamar in particular is hard to digest from a modern Western perspective because many of the elements are understated and workaday. Greek mythology is no better obviously. From Zeus raping Leda, Achilles throwing a fit because his sex-slave was taken away, to the tradition of Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia.

In some cases the shocking aspect of ancient stories is because moderns have different values. Slavery and concubinage were taken for granted during the period that the Hebrew Bible and Classical mythology crystallized into the forms which came down to us. In other cases I presume that it was unlikely that small children were going to ever read the original stories themselves, so sexual elements that might confuse were probably omitted in some oral tellings.

This is not to say that  is a modern masterpiece. But some of the disquieting, and frankly perverse, aspects of the narrative are only shocking if your standard is the relatively antiseptic literary fiction which one finds between the Regency and the cultural revolution of the 1960s. That is the aberration in human history, while gritty genre fiction much closer to primal human storytelling.

Why A Song of Ice and Fire is more definitive than A Game of Thrones

Posted on by Razib Khan

Wired has a piece out George R. R. Martin Doesn’t Need to Finish Writing the Game of Thrones Books. The title is needlessly provocative, as there are many good points in the article (though I understand clickbait considerations). Over the years I’ve come to expect and accept that the “great fork” is here to stay, and the books and the the television shows are in some deep and fundamental ways going to be distinct narratives (though Martin and the producers of the television show assert that their conclusion will be congruent, which I actually think may not be optimal).

But the author dismisses an important point rather flippantly:

For the last few years being able to say “Sure, yes, but the books are better” has provided a nice little dopamine rush. But beyond that thrill, what Game of Thrones fans really want is more Game of Thrones. And right now, their best bet for getting that is on premium cable.

Earlier there are comparisons made to the books which inspired , , , and . These are all cases where films overshadowed the literary works which preceded them.

But none of these works are on par with the world-building and richness of George R. R. Martin’s series (especially the first three books, , , and ). Additionally, in the case of the and I think most people agree that the films are far superior artistic productions to the books. And in relation to Blade Runner, most people know that Philip K Dick’s story was only tenuously connected to the movie adaptation.

I understand that writers are sometimes given tasks or make a really good pitch on the most general terms. But if the points wouldn’t pass muster wit your high school English teacher, should they pass muster with a national magazine? In the clickbait era, probably. But I’m still here to point out that Mrs. Barry would not have approved….