Sort by time | Sort by thread (beta)

Link to this comment:

Share to:

All Comments (172)

Sign In or Sign Up now to post a comment!
  • Thats so wrong. Ancestors double up so fucking often. You could be breeding with your 5th cousin and never know thats only 5 generations back and doubling up of ancestors occur for your kids.

  • On my iPad, half of the title is missing where this video is listed, so it reads "Stephen Fry blows Sean Lock..."

    I just thought "wow, Youtube has certainly changed!"

  • Alan: "That was bound to happen one day on this show". Love it! :D

  • and thats why i only mate with my mother

  • I used this point when my friends were criticising prince William being 8th cousins with his wife Kate or something stupid like this

  • I do like Sean Locke, but I don't like him on QI.

  • Does 14 kids = 28 parents? No. 14 kids could have the same set of parents. Poor argument from a normally rational man.

  • @MichaeIRedd At 00:38 he said that it can't be the case and that you'd have to share parents...

  • @MichaeIRedd Don't be a moron and watch the whole video BEFORE commenting on it.

  • @SubTachyon Watched it twice. Then commented.

  • @MichaeIRedd And you still didn't get it? You must be a moron then. My apologies.

  • @MichaeIRedd You do know that this material is provided to him on an Autocue and he is simply sharing it by reading it out.

  • @harrysfraser Most of it is fed to him by the producers but he still studies and researches the facts for himself and he is certainly intellectual enough to understand and elaborate on what he is talking about.

  • @harrysfraser You do realize he has won the celebrity version of Mastermind..

  • @ayush359 Yes I do.

  • Shiny tinsel would blow Sean Lock's mind.

  • 0:20 18 or 80 billion. Let's say 4 generations per century. Could be a little bit more. 13th century means 8 centuries ago. So 8 * 4 = 32 generation's. 2^32 = 4.294.967.296. Well, that's about right then! With 5 generations per century it would be more than 1.000.000.000.000

  • @jirrenno would you muiltply by 2? Everyone has 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 greatgrandparents, etc, etc. So the numbers increase exponentially in a very short amount of time. I could be wrong (I was never good at maths) but it seems to me like you've only taken account of one pair of ancesters per generation.

  • @sh1tonwba please show respect for the greatest quiz show host in television history.

  • @bloocuttlefish who bob holness

  • Fry. Legend.

    

  • so is this show just listing facts? that's it?

  • @Samodrei they ask a question, then the comedians think of funny answers for a while, before trying to answer it. The question is normally related to some misconception the public has too.

    basically, it's hilarious, and educational, with some of the most intelligent and funny people as panellists. I wish more TV was like this, and not the fucking mind numbing shit thats normally on.

  • @Samodrei Yep. No page 3 girls with their tits out or people singing Take That covers, just interesting facts.

  • blue eyes only appeared between 6 and 10 thousand years ago, from one individual.

    all blue eyed people are related

  • @Neylonx All people are related...

  • @MrScillage well technically, all life on earth is probably related, due to our 'single genesis' (i am NOT talking about religion)

    but i think 6000 years is recent enough to be interesting.

  • @Neylonx Oh no, neither was I, that's the worst theory that's been completely blown out of the water since people discovered the earth was not, in fact, fact. In my opinion anyway :) But yeah, that is a lot more recent than a couple billion years of life :P

  • @MrScillage nah i know you werent, i was just making sure my use of the word 'genesis' was not misinterpreted ha

  • Well, that is quite...interesting. :)

  • This video makes a great argument in favor of interracial relationships.

  • you inbreeding dribblers. all of you. fucking each other like rabbits on crack

  • @ExplosiveYawn Who?

  • Check out video entitled "QI: Worst Song" - Hilarious line from Sean Lock: "Free Myra Hindley!"

  • Thirteenth Century 80 billion ancestors? Bad maths, thats not many generations back.

  • I agree it isnt anywhere near enough, just in the past century alone each 7 billion of us would have 2 parents and they would each have 2 parents, which would make 28 billion before we hit the 19th century.

  • @photonman666 no one said 80 billion...

  • @Robsfund Stephen Fry said 80 billion...

  • @photonman666 How many generations do you think we'd have in 800 years, assuming a median childbearing age of about 15?

  • @photonman666 Sorry, MEAN childbearing age.

  • @photonman666

    Your 2 parents have 4 parents and they have 16 relatives and such and so on, so he's right.

  • @photonman666

    1 doubled 36 times = around 70 billion, that is 800 years divided by 36 generations. That gives you an average childbearing age of 22.22. Perfectly acceptable.... If a couple had a baby in 1200, and it had a baby at or around 22, and it had a baby, yadda yadda yadda and that continued untill now ,without any interuption, there would be 68,000,000,000 direct decendants. So IM saying 80 Billion, it is a good estimate. Sorry for the Maths lesson! Peace

  • @peski73 Small criticism here: One doubled 36 times = 1.

    I do get your point though, and discounting that prime error you did very nicely.

  • @darkridr25 If your gunna be that pernickety, surely it would be 2, or 72. But not 1.

  • @IABCZI No, I was making an attempt at humor, and made an error. See my response to peski73 for further details. The correct answer wouldn't be either 2 or 72 though, as we're talking about doubling, not just multiplying. Think of it as 2^35, or two to the thirty-fifth power.

  • @darkridr25

    Hahaha, Thank you, I started to confuse myself after I had written it...i was a bit drunk, i was drunk drividing.

    But im sure 1 doubled is 2.

    IE 1x2=2, has to be the same as; 2x1=2.

    Otherwise the pub has been stiffing me!

    Or have i missed something? are you thinking i meant 1x1=2? My calculator seems to think that doubling 1 is equal to 2. What am i missing?

    Sorry, i like to learn!!

  • @peski73 Whoops! Actually, you are right! I was thinking anything multiplied by one would be itself, but forgot that taking that answer and further doubling it would give the desired result, minus one of those steps. *bonks self*

    I was attempting to make a joke along the lines of the old math joke 1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8x9x0=, and wound up having the joke be on me. :)

  • @darkridr25

    Ahhhh 0.....Nice 1. Peace and love to you for knowing what I was banging on about! Hahaha. I spent hours explaining this to my buddy!

    Also, I was trying to write. "To the power of 35" But didnt know how to type it, i can write it on paper, but translating that to type, was testing! Now i know!

    Educational Big-ups, to you!

  • @peski73 Thanks! :)

    Yes, it's hard since it's so difficult to display a superscript in text. Because of that, programmers found an alternative which has become the norm when using a computer: You use a carat to represent a power. so 2 to the 35th power is represented this way:

    2^35

    Peace and love back to you! It was a true pleasure chatting with you. :)

  • There were a few people in different culture's histories that are probably the ancestor to a huge percentage of people. The first emperor of China was put out to stud with thousands of harem girls, Vlad the Impaler and other mass killers/rapists of Europe could have had hundreds or thousands of kids...I think I read that Ghengis Khan was the ancestor to at least 8% of modern Koreans. Incest is most important via the chances of too many recessive detrimental genes lining up, causing problems.

  • @MANofINACTION At some point, any species that evolved had to have committed incest to become what it did, to breed only within a certain group...but thats way, way back for humans. If we believe the population was less than tens of billions a thousand years ago (and we do), there HAD to be cousins having children...doesn't mean first courins or siblings was normal, though it has happened. Where's the incest line? sibling, 1st cousin, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th...all related

  • @newguy33X Lets say i was born with a unicorn horn and the ladies just loved it and i had mated with 50 ladies and have 100 kids with unicorn horns. After they grow up the ladies and guys are also very attracted to them and they likewise have 100's of kids with unicorn horns. Much later down the line the unicorn people become so different from the non-unicorn people as to be a different species. This didn't require any form of incest. While incest was still possible its not required.

  • @LostHisMarbles you're in some at least distant way already related to the ladies and the mates of your children...unless the species started off as uncountable hundreds of billions of unrelated people many hundreds of thousands of years ago...no, it started out as few who bred (and even inbred by our modern legal definitions)...the links get weaker, but they're still there.

  • @newguy33X read they story i put in my last comment again, it doesn't require any incest.

  • Omg man get out of here. I am talking about incest INCEST!!! And read my story again. And I'm not going to do the math for you but it doesn't require uncountable billions of a species to avoid incest. All humans are related in some way that's not part of the argument.

  • @LostHisMarbles and the unicorn people have to breed just within their own population for a long time to become different from the general population of people.

  • What a loud video.

  • I read somewhere that if you go back to a certain date, you're related to everyone.... twice

  • @0801141401 are you karl pilkington?

  • Thou shalt not question Stephen Fry.

  • @MaxwellMurderx7 <3 Pip!

  • I lost him on "8 16"

  • @MrF1refly he's talking about as you go up the ladder in your generations you have double the preceding number of the previous level. 2 parents 4 grand parents 8 great grandparents 16 great great grandparents and so on. The point is if u keep doing that the math overtakes the population of Earth and you have to duplicate

  • @babytweeze85 So, incest then...? :(

  • @newguy33X no. Its mostly distant and very distant relatives getting married... no incest necessary here ; )

  • @DKzgd I think for many prehistoric people it wasn't very distant relatives...many modern peoples still have a "2nd cousin or farther away is okay" or even "your first cousins on your dad's side are off limits, but not the first cousins on your mom's". I guess you can draw an incest line. If the average age of parents was 21 and there were only non-relative pairings, back in 1300 there would have to have been over 8.5 billion people in the world just to have one total non-inbred now.

  • That we do, all the way back to the beginning of time.

  • Mind blown...

    

  • Press 7

  • Sean's reaction gets me every time. Someone should totally do an edit that shows his head actually exploding.

  • It's not "mathematical". This is like Fermi's question: "When you take a single breath, how many molecules of gas you intake would have come from the dying breath of Caesar?". If you assume the molecules in his last breath have diffused evenly to the whole atmosphere, never got absorbed by plants, etc., then there would seem to be a huge probability. But reality is more complicated. And so are genetic lines. Some people living today don't share a single ancestor in over 10000 years.

  • @RFC3514 Sorry to brake it to you but they will have shared ancestors. It is unavoidable, because no one knows all of their ancestors. Illegitimate children are often unaccounted for in family trees or included under the wrong father to save face. Several factors lead to unknown fathers. Have you ever heard of a relationship breaking up as they find they share a common ancestor ten, twenty or a hundred generation back.

  • @OMGyouAREaTWAT - I don't need any "brakes", and no, it's not unavoidable, on the contrary. Even within Europe, some genetic lines had no points of contact for two thousand years or more. When you compare different continents, the separation is even greater. Until quite recently, people lived their entire lives in a small area. There was a LOT of interbreeding within each population, but not between different populations. Australian aborigines are a typical example of isolation.

  • Comment removed

  • Comment removed

  • now whenever I see "mind=blown" 0:30 will spring to mind.

  • You know the title really is misleading...

  • I am related to more people than there are?

  • @FictionWeLiveIn It means there was a lot of incest...that many people only had two parents, two grandparents, and /or two great grandparents, etc....first cousins, first cousins once removed (your first cousin's kids), even brothers and sisters were up for grabs. Most cultures had taboos on this, but apparently it happened...

  • @newguy33X no it doesnt mean "there was a lot of incest", cause incest is sexual intercourse between CLOSE relatives, not ALL relatives... by that logic every human is a child of incest cause we are all related in some way or another, and we all share common ancestors...

    and its not that "any species that evolved had to have committed incest to become what it did", its in fact quite opposite...

  • @DKzgd if there's one species (say an orangutan-like ape) and it is to become several species (say, modern orangutans, gorillas, bonobo chimps, chimps, and humans), what has to happen within that species? Different groups have to form (via geographical ranges, mutations, sex selection, etc.), and only breed within their own (comparatively) smaller group for a very long time. Mating can amplify good (big brains) as well as bad traits in a population that (comparatively) inbreeds.

  • @newguy33X there you go again; making your own definitions of words and trying to play semantic games -.-'

    Specimens breeding " within their own (comparatively) smaller group" does not automatically means incest, nor does having a shared ancestors automatically makes you an "inbred".

    8.wtf O_o

    16 pairs is all it takes to prolong species indefinitely without their offspring ever having to merry someone who is not their 5th cousin (with each pair having 2 children, 1 male 1 female)

  • @DKzgd It's possibilities of getting double sets of detrimental recessive genes that's important. How many different ways would the members of this population be 5th, 6th, etc. cousins? How many times over? This would increase the chances of too many detrimental gene pairings in too many offspring. I am not trying to "play" semantics, just saying that there IS a relation...we can take "incest" out of it, say "stronger/weaker" relation.

  • @newguy33X there wouldnt be any 6th or more cousins, you could only go up to 5th -.-'

    Yes you were playing semantics games; and now you are saying something completely opposite of what you have been saying... and you are actually defending my point now ; )

  • So we"re all eventually brothers and sisters? :D Gross :P

  • @tntmofo me gusta.

  • @tntmofo Shut up! I'm gonna tell mom!

  • @LionHeartPortugues Oh no! please dont! I promise to be good!

  • I love it when I can't hear the video over the racket of a pin dropping

  • Funny cant and a wonderful show, in what year did it start and finish

  • @Leowen2 started in 2003, the I series (series 8) is currently on BBC1 and it will continue until 2029, as there is planned to be a series per letter in the alphabet!

  • @Leowen2 still new episodes coming out every week

  • I'm with Sean on this one. I don't understand this at all. xD

  • @MrBuch169169 He's saying your granny and granddad were brother and sister.

  • so.... once some siblings descendants have been separated and mixed out into the population (itself made of distant siblings from the passed mixed around) for long enough it's safe to mix back in? that's kinda like speciation from geographical/sexual isolation, but only halfway to 'cannot interbreed', then back in the mix!

    when a pregnant mother lizard is swept out to sea and finds an island (once in a million yrs) and populates it, do we see genetic bottlenecks like in cheetahs?

  • Hello brothers and sisters!

  • @god0fgod blow me

  • haha I love this show

  • Incest: fun for all the family!

  • QI = incredible facts and brilliantly funny = = quality tv

  • Fibonacci sequence

  • Basically what this means is we are all related. I guess we should act more poiltely to each since we're all family!

  • @Peter24601 I hate my family.

  • The preview text that I clicked to get here said, "Stephen Fry blows Sean Lock..."

  • @ebiljebus And you thought you'd click on it? :P

  • @ebiljebus You have 69 thumbs up. lol

  • @ebiljebus I know, I was disappointed too.

  • @ebiljebus So that is the reason you decided to watch this? xD

  • His mind was getting fucked for a moment.

  • Giggled a little too loduly there..

  • you have more ancestors than there have been humans the same way that you could possibly only have 2 grandparents. kinda nasty example, but true anyway.

  • wheres the full clip of this heh

  • Except it is not true. Mathematically

  • FIND ME A MAN WHO’S MIND CAN’T BE BLOWN BY STEPHEN FRY.

  • @scream4thehellofit

    How about the QI researcher?

  • @superhamzah85 He is merely one of Stephen's biological experiments.

  • @scream4thehellofit

    And Alan Davies is one of his bio-illogical experiments.

  • @scream4thehellofit find me a man who stephen fry wouldn't blow (sorry, very mean, quite untrue, but still funny, he is gay after all.) i simply couldn't help myself.

  • @kght222 Find me a man who wouldn't blow stephen fry ;)

  • @scream4thehellofit most of them? but still nice retort heh =P

  • Sean heard that and thought "Mind = Blown"

  • Can't believe the naïveté here. Anyone who does a little genealogy will find a cousin marriage in their ancestry. FIRST cousin marriages were not uncommon until sometime in the 20th century. Darwin married his first cousin. The risk of inbreeding is exaggerated in modern society. It's when you keep doing it that you get results like Carlos II of Spain (look him up).

  • @schutzenhaus

    In a thousand years time, we'll look back, and see almost all marriages within what we define as a race, and they'll think we were inbreds, which explains why we couldn't manage to run an economy properly, blame hurricanes on gay people, allowed the mere existance of the Catholic Church, actually had debates about the ethics of stem cells and still went to war, using violence to solve conflicts.

    What we really need to do is mate with aliens, why else are we tryng to find them?

  • @superhamzah85 preferably aliens with 3 breasts.. that's the logical next step

  • @diehardmclean

    The only thing we can guarantee upon the discovery of alien beings is alien porn on the internet. Pretty much everything else is pure speculation.

  • @superhamzah85

    we allready have that, don't we?

    (rule 34)

  • "Incest" is an overstatement, because it means a sexual relationship with a person too closely related to marry. Most places today allow 2nd+ cousins to marry. Really,for much of human history, I'm sure marriage between 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th cousins was the norm. I mean, going back to a 5th cousin... there are 64 4x great grandparents to choose from, and 126 total ancestors per person. When you lived in a small village or tribe, it would've been hard to meet anybody who didn't overlap there.

  • @CheckerOfReality Um....he means incest in the absolute sense...not what is governmentally defined as incest. Fucking your cousin is still fucking your cousin, even if the govt. says it's ok.

  • @TheGreatOldOnes I'm going by the dictionary definition. In an absolute sense, we're all cousins... the question is how close of a cousin is too close to reproduce with? Governments and geneticists both seem to agree that 2nd cousins on are distant enough. It's taboo in most modern societies, of course. But I'm sure a lot of 4th or 5th cousins are now married, who don't even realize they're cousins. I mean, do you know who any of your 4th or 5th cousins are? So where is the line drawn?

  • @CheckerOfReality I don't know who most of my first cousins are

  • Don't various conditions of endogeny throughout history pretty much torpedo Stephen's argument here?

  • @IoEstasCedonta

    How would it?

  • Salutations from Planet X!

  • Greetings from Middle Earth.

  • Cheers from Narnia!

  • So pretty much every other English person alive right now is in some way related to me? All be it extremely distantly, like a mutual great (x10) grand mother.

  • @MANofINACTION How can one family tree "fold into itself" without any form of incest ? I do get how, within a given population, all the people end up sharing common ancestors (which is the point S. Fry makes) but for one single family tree to see the number of its "branches" reduced the further back you go without incest being involved makes very little to no sense at all.

  • @Mirea1986 well, would you consider it incest if you were to marry a person who was related to you only by your great great great great grandmother who is a cousin of their great great great great grandmother? Yes, by definition, incest is involved, but i wouldn't put it at the same level as you marrying your brother/sister.

  • mindfuck lol

  • @MANofINACTION He said that....

  • Incest: A game the whole family can play!

  • @MANofINACTION

    That's the problem with a know-it-all like Stephen Fry. A person that really knows a subject will trounce him.

  • @boliusb The thing is, he knows that too.

  • @spacecowboy5000

    heh, what a genius he is!

  • @boliusb thou shalt not speak ill of Stephen Fry

  • I feel a little less guilty for fancying my cousins now.

  • @CaptainBanglawala cousinS? Forget cousins for a second, how many people did you MARRY?!! :P

  • @sweetbutdaring OVER 9'000!!!

  • lolol great clip. Sean Lock kills me

  • Oh David Mitchell, the things I'd do to you...

  • I like this part; watched it recently.

  • Such a good show. Hello from Australia

  • @wyrwich And hello from America! This is a great show.

  • @wyrwich

    Hello are you going to contribute to some of the license fee by any chance?

  • @wyrwich WHO GIVS A FCK ??

  • No comments? Sean Lock's mind gets blow and humanity is: no comment. We should all be thankful for incest. That's the moral of this little story.

  • @Jimbostina It doesn't have to be incest. One mother/father pair can have multiple children.

    For example, say one mother/father pair has four children, by his math, there should be 8 people involved (4 children with two parents each, 4 * 2 = 8) when in fact there is only 6 people involved (4 kids, 1 father, 1 mother).

  • @MinorVictory your example has no sense, cause stephen was talking about one's direct ancestors, not brothers and sisters. So by *his math* you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, so if we stop here thats 14 ppl involved..

    This is about ppl who had, for instance; the same great-great-great-great-grandf­ather... 5th, 6th and more generations cousins getting married...

    incest is just relation between close relatives, not all relatives, cause we are all relatives in some way...

  • @MinorVictory No, what he is saying is tha every one of those children has 2 parents, a mother and a father, and each one has 4 grandparents, it is only showing one persons ancestory.