MALE NUMBERING MECHANISM

 

Every man is born with one of these mechanisms (in the office-supply business, they're called numberers) inside his body:

 

Each such "male numbering mechanism" has a number of marker-wheels which are locked into place. The father has no external control of the settings of the Marker-Wheels on the mechanism.  Each Marker-Wheel has specific ranges of values, but is preset for a given man to the values he inherited from his father. The specific range of values for each Marker-Wheel is generally also different for different Marker-Wheels.

 

When he fathers a son, a father generally transmits to the son an exact copy of the numbering mechanism inside his body with the same pre-set values on the Marker-Wheels which he inherited from his father.

 

However, over a period of time the mechanism may have deteriorated due to wear and tear on (or abuse of) the body. If so, one of the Marker-Wheels may "slip", and the pre-set value can change, but only within a very limited range.

 

Since this numbering mechanism is inside a man's body, we must take advantage of special tools in order to determine the values it contains. Fortunately for family researchers, there are laboratories staffed by highly-trained scientific personnel who can use various techniques and measurement devices to determine these values. From the study of large numbers of such mechanisms, these scientists have found that a change in value of 1 for a given Marker-Wheel can be expected to happen on average about every 500 generations or father-to-son transmissions. 

 

If these values are measured and reported for a group of 25 Marker-Wheels, then it might be expected that a change in value for one of these Marker-Wheels might be observed every 20 generations (500 generations divided by 25 markers). Since an average generation is usually assumed to be about 20-25 years, then a change in the value of one of the Marker-Wheels might be expected to be observed  within a paternal family line on average about every 400-500 years. Coincidentally, this corresponds to the approximate age of European settlement in what is now the United States of America.

 

 

A few questions posed to and answered by some of these highly-trained scientific personnel at one of the testing laboratories (Bennett Greenspan of FamilyTreeDNA):

Question: Do the marker-wheels always "slip" in the same direction?
Answer: No, there is a bias to increase in size, but the percentages are not yet clear. Markes with larger values tend to increase over time, while those with smaller values tend to decrease.
 

Question: How often do the Markers "slip" by a value other than 1?
Answer: In a study in 1999 by the Max Planck Institute of 5000 father-son pairs, the observation was 14 Markers changed in transmission from father to son. Thirteen of the Markers changed by a value of 1, while one changed by a value of 2.
 

Question: How often does a "slip" in value of one Marker-Wheel result in a simultaneous "slip" in value of another Marker-Wheel?
Answer: If the markers are not in a linked region, then no linkage between two markers should exist. We believe that all our markers are unlinked.

Question: What are the different ranges of values for the Marker-Wheels?
Answer: There is a detailed examination of the values observed to date at Ybase.Org.