I am reading the new book Advanced Genetic Genealogy edited by Debbie Parker Wayne. So far, excellent book, full of challenging methodology, case studies, and much more detailed information on how and why DNA works for genealogy than any other books on the market so far.

I was just reading the chapter by Kathryn J. Johnston, MD on X-DNA in which there is a section titled “The Fibonacci sequence is what makes the X unique.” The Fibonacci sequence is a really cool phenomenon that happens in nature quite regularly. The numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. The sequence starts with the number one and the number that follows is a sum of the previous two numbers (1+1=2, 1+2 = 3, 2+3=5, etc.). The numbers of X-DNA ancestors in each generation follows the Fibonacci sequence!¹

First of all, I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art. I am not a math person. But I know about the Fibonacci sequence by watching these YouTube videos by Vihart called “Doodling in Math Class.”² I love how math and nature interact.

While this does not really have much to do with genealogy, I thought it was a really cool point that reminded me of some fun videos and I just wanted to share. Fibonacci is everywhere in nature, even in our DNA!

     ^{1. Debbie Parker Wayne, editor, Advanced Genetic Genealogy: Techniques and Case Studies (Cushing, Tx.: Wayne Research, 2019), 76.↩
     2. There is a series of three videos having to do with the spirals in plants. Very cool!↩}