03-May-2011, 01:44 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-May-2011, 01:52 AM by Ajita Kamal.)
This is a conversation started in the Chennai Freethinkers group on Facebook.
Here is the original article.
Nikhil Rajagopalan What I find more hilarious is that that page is copy protected!
Saturday at 12:50am · Like
Sanjay Kumar Ganesh where are you? can you get cut the crap of this BS
Saturday at 1:20am · Like
Arjun Ishwar Nikhil and I are trying our best ! It would be cool if you guys could join us ..lol
Saturday at 1:21am · Like
Sanjay Kumar Ganesh is a doc and a pepped up guy when it comes such BS...i think he has the technical ammo to quell this what shall i say(quite exasperated)
Saturday at 1:22am · Like · 1 person
Nikhil Rajagopalan This just in... by the mystical powers of clairvoyance and truth, my mind's eye just informed me that the Prince and Kate Middleton are of the same gothram..Somebody tell them ;-) LOL!!
Saturday at 2:52am · Like · 1 person
Kit Kittappa This crap is not an article in a scientific journal and will never be. What we definitely know is Africa is the place man originated. We are all descendants of Lucy from Africa.
Saturday at 6:22am · Like
Kit Kittappa "English word Cow is a derived word of the Sanskrit word Gau"
The fact is Sanskrit not only shares word roots with Latin and other European languages but also shares the same sentence structure with them. It does not share the sentence structure of all Indian languages like Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam etc. That is the sentence structure of Indian languages is Subject -- Object -- Verb whereas in European languages and Sanskrit it is Subject -- Verb -- Object.
Saturday at 8:19am · Like
Kit Kittappa English: Aswathama killed the elephant.
Saturday at 8:19am · Like
Kit Kittappa Sanskrit: Aswathama hatha kunjaraha.
whereas in
Tamil: Aswathaman yanaai-ik kondran.
Hindi: Aswathama hathi ko mardalia.
Telugu: Aswathamudu yenuguni champasinadu.
In fact that shows that Sanskrit is foreign to India. It so happens that Indian languages have borrowed words from Sanskrit. It appears lots of Sanskrit words were borrowed also when Buddhism and Jainism spread all over India.
Saturday at 8:29am · Like
Kit Kittappa "Prajapatis are those who were the immediate descendants of Brahma (the Creator God)"
You would never find this statement in a scientific journal. It is just religious crap.
Saturday at 8:34am · Like
Arjun Ishwar Kit, you should post over there. He does reply to all the comments, you have to give him that..
Saturday at 9:39am · Like · 1 person
Kit Kittappa Where is "there"?
Saturday at 12:28pm · Like
Nikhil Rajagopalan He means post a reply on that website whose link is provided above.
Saturday at 12:29pm · Like · 1 person
Pravar Mahajan Hah! Cartload of BS.
Firstly, the probability of genetic disorders through harmful mutations decreases _exponentially_ as the distance from the last common ancestor increases. That is, marrying once own sister would carry a risk of about 50% of harmful genes present in the progeny. For the case of cousin marriage, it decreases to 25%. For 2nd cousin, this decreases to 12.5 % and so on. That means, in a case a man and a woman are separated by 10 generations, the probability of having genetic orders in progeny decreases to about 0.1%.
Yesterday at 4:17am · Like · 1 person
Pravar Mahajan And there is no sanctity about male lineage, as the author has tried to prove. Even females carry the harmful mutations from father. Although, the author has tried to dodge this argument by stating the Y-chromosome is carried intact by the males. Yes, this is right, but I wonder how this helps authors case. This is so, because the Y-chromosome is intact from father, and hence there is no 'amplification' of the harmful factors because of the risk of getting same mutations from the mother. Inbreeding is harmful for precisely the reason that we may have an amplification of harmful mutations if we get it from both mother and father. Hence, this argument fails
Yesterday at 4:17am · Like · 1 person
Pravar Mahajan The author has conveniently ignored that point that the Y-chromosome present in all the males, _in fact_ comes from a single ancestor - The Y-chromosomal Adam.
Yesterday at 4:17am · Like
Pravar Mahajan Just like the Y-chromosome which males get exclusively from our fathers, there is the mitochondrial DNA which we get exclusively from our mothers. So, this further weakens his argument that only male lineage needs to be tracked down.
Yesterday at 4:18am · Like · 2 people
Pravar Mahajan This is just another bullshit way of glorifying ones religion by showing tying its superstitions and myth with modern science. This is not just morally incorrect thing to do, but it also creates a wrong picture of science in minds of people. Such people accept all that which confirms their scriptures (through brutal modifications of scientific facts and reinterpretations of scriptures - of course), but at the same time conveniently reject those scientific ideas which go against their belief systems. This is dangerous.
Yesterday at 4:18am · Like · 2 people
Arjun Ishwar @Pravar : You are preaching to the choir, sir!
9 hours ago · Like · 1 person
Kit Kittappa @Arjun: Thanks for the suggestion. I have posted "there". If someone see a reply, please let me know. I am not subscribing to that blog.
4 hours ago · Like · 1 person
Arjun Ishwar will do sir
3 hours ago · Like
Kit Kittappa Please call me just Kit. Thank you.
3 hours ago · Like
Nikhil Rajagopalan Kit: under what name have you posted? I'd like very much to read ur comments. Also find my reply to his post below
"I'm not buying any of this. I am 100% genetically identical to myself. My brother would have some of my genes as he could have inherited them from my mom or dad. If incest were to happen between a brother and sister, the chances of homozygous recessive lethal genes is very high and the progeny would die (stillbirth or subsequently). As the number of common ancestors relating two people decrease the chances of the above scenario decreases rapidly. One can marry a distantly related cousin by this example. So how will marrying a random member of a population 7 billion strong be considered incestuous? Are you telling me that I am to ditch the love of my life based on this gothra concept; because she would be my "sister"? I laud and appreciate your patience and tolerance of other posters' opinions, but I do not accept your conviction in this matter."
3 hours ago · Like
Kit Kittappa Nikhil, I posted a copy of what I had said here under my name Kit Kittappa.
3 hours ago · Like
Arjun Ishwar Kit: Theres a reply to your post . I am going to paste it here for your convenience
"Cool - you just changed the entire linguistic branching, but sad that you do not know that Ashwathama kunjararaha hatha is also an equally valid Sanskrit sentence"
2 hours ago · Like
Nikhil Rajagopalan Found it!! A paper in the Lancet that says that in Feb 2011, they used a SNP-based microarray that noted the reduced heterozygosity in some children with development issues. This reduced heterozygosity can also be used to determine if the child was born of an incestuous relationship. This can be used to disprove the whole gothram nonsense. Marry two people of the same gothram and get the child tested. If the above is observed in a majority of cases, there may be some inkling of sense in the system. But I doubt that.
2 hours ago · Like · 1 person
Nikhil Rajagopalan Posted at that blog site too."How can anyone justify the origins of this "gothram" system to begin with? It's not like there were an arbitrary number of families at the beginning of time; like the flasks of E.coli in the Lenski experiment. To say that all Brahmins or whoever descended from these express number of families is a tall claim. Secondly how did that number come about? Don't scripture me. :-)
This whole concept revolves around the creation of "families" that bans marriage amongst themselves. This is as ridiculous as saying I can't marry an Indian woman because we are all brothers and sisters. I would do the only smart thing and go for genetic counseling. As my final riposte to you sir, I present you with a paper published in The Lancet (doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(11)60201-8) that says that the child of an incestuous marriage can be noted for lack of heterozygosity. Now for argument sake, let's marry say... a 1000 couples of the same "gothram" together and let's have their children tested. Using standard mathematical confidence levels, if most of the children show mental challenges or otherwise, I'll concede that the "Gothram" system may show some premise. Otherwise I stick to my guns and say it's a load of utter tosh."
about an hour ago · Like · 1 person
Kit Kittappa @AI: Thanks. That guy is trying to ignore Sanskrit grammar. Here is another sentence.
about an hour ago · Like
Kit Kittappa English: I am Aswathama. (Object at end)
Sanskrit: Aham Aswathama (Object at end)
whereas
Hindi: Mein Aswathama hum (Object in the middle)
Tamil: Naan Aswathaman aaven (Object in the middle)
He thinks colloquially when we change the order people still understand and so it would be accepted grammatically or maybe he does not know much Sanskrit except to quote slohams and looking up meaning of every word.
about an hour ago · Like
Vaibhav N Mehta In my opinion the Gothra system was a smart move by our ancestors (very smart for that time). Also, there's actually no proof that this system was created for religious reasons. If you think about it, the people involved in the creation of the Gothra system may not have been religious at all. They probably were scholars who were very practical in their approaches. So when they speak about their theories in public, people who believe start practicing, and over time, these practices turn into religious beliefs. No one challenged the beliefs because the entire society would believe in it (the common man is either too lazy or ignorant about scientific concepts). And even if there was a free-thinking scholar born after 100s of generations, he wouldn't know about the science, because it would be lost in time.
Okay, I think I jumped into a whole new topic all together, sorry! But what I was meaning to say is that the Gothra system was good for those times since the population of the towns/cities people lived in was very insignificant. They had to have a system! They probably formed this system only after watching people suffer and the pravaras were probably the ones that survived such fates (and maybe due to this reason they were named the sons of God). I realize I take various assumptions here, but I am only trying to reason the whole mess out.
As far as the mitochondrial genes are concerned, I think that's the least they could have cared about. Hell, there can be numerous defective genes in the 22 other pairs (same gothra or not). All they aimed for is a healthy penis!
Maybe, it's high time the system is revised, or more appropriately, modernized! It's only painful to imagine how this one might have polluted the minds of common people
51 minutes ago · Like
Nikhil Rajagopalan Or we could marry whomever we want who we know in our (scientific) knowledge are not related to us and not worry about this so called "system".
47 minutes ago · Like
Nikhil Rajagopalan or do the experiment I suggested a few comments up.
46 minutes ago · Like
Vaibhav N Mehta Not caring about the system and marrying would be a very peacefully simple alternative, I would totally do it. Carrying out the experiment as you said would be interesting, but completely unethical.. lol!
40 minutes ago · Like
Here is the original article.
Quote:Arjun Ishwar
Wow, this guy demonstrates his ignorance of evolution of sex and stable strategies, and uses his ill informed knowledge of genetics to justify the Gotras...what do u guys think?
Quote:HitXP » Science of Genetics behind the Hindu Gotra System – The Y Chromosome and the Male Lineage -on Friday · Like · · Share · Subscribe
http://www.hitxp.com
The Gotra is a system which associates a person with his most ancient or root ancestor in an unbroken male lineage. For instance if a person says that he belongs to the Bharadwaja Gotra then it means that he traces back his male ancestry to the ancient Rishi (Saint or Seer) Bharadwaja. So Gotra refe
Nikhil Rajagopalan What I find more hilarious is that that page is copy protected!
Saturday at 12:50am · Like
Sanjay Kumar Ganesh where are you? can you get cut the crap of this BS
Saturday at 1:20am · Like
Arjun Ishwar Nikhil and I are trying our best ! It would be cool if you guys could join us ..lol
Saturday at 1:21am · Like
Sanjay Kumar Ganesh is a doc and a pepped up guy when it comes such BS...i think he has the technical ammo to quell this what shall i say(quite exasperated)
Saturday at 1:22am · Like · 1 person
Nikhil Rajagopalan This just in... by the mystical powers of clairvoyance and truth, my mind's eye just informed me that the Prince and Kate Middleton are of the same gothram..Somebody tell them ;-) LOL!!
Saturday at 2:52am · Like · 1 person
Kit Kittappa This crap is not an article in a scientific journal and will never be. What we definitely know is Africa is the place man originated. We are all descendants of Lucy from Africa.
Saturday at 6:22am · Like
Kit Kittappa "English word Cow is a derived word of the Sanskrit word Gau"
The fact is Sanskrit not only shares word roots with Latin and other European languages but also shares the same sentence structure with them. It does not share the sentence structure of all Indian languages like Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam etc. That is the sentence structure of Indian languages is Subject -- Object -- Verb whereas in European languages and Sanskrit it is Subject -- Verb -- Object.
Saturday at 8:19am · Like
Kit Kittappa English: Aswathama killed the elephant.
Saturday at 8:19am · Like
Kit Kittappa Sanskrit: Aswathama hatha kunjaraha.
whereas in
Tamil: Aswathaman yanaai-ik kondran.
Hindi: Aswathama hathi ko mardalia.
Telugu: Aswathamudu yenuguni champasinadu.
In fact that shows that Sanskrit is foreign to India. It so happens that Indian languages have borrowed words from Sanskrit. It appears lots of Sanskrit words were borrowed also when Buddhism and Jainism spread all over India.
Saturday at 8:29am · Like
Kit Kittappa "Prajapatis are those who were the immediate descendants of Brahma (the Creator God)"
You would never find this statement in a scientific journal. It is just religious crap.
Saturday at 8:34am · Like
Arjun Ishwar Kit, you should post over there. He does reply to all the comments, you have to give him that..
Saturday at 9:39am · Like · 1 person
Kit Kittappa Where is "there"?
Saturday at 12:28pm · Like
Nikhil Rajagopalan He means post a reply on that website whose link is provided above.
Saturday at 12:29pm · Like · 1 person
Pravar Mahajan Hah! Cartload of BS.
Firstly, the probability of genetic disorders through harmful mutations decreases _exponentially_ as the distance from the last common ancestor increases. That is, marrying once own sister would carry a risk of about 50% of harmful genes present in the progeny. For the case of cousin marriage, it decreases to 25%. For 2nd cousin, this decreases to 12.5 % and so on. That means, in a case a man and a woman are separated by 10 generations, the probability of having genetic orders in progeny decreases to about 0.1%.
Yesterday at 4:17am · Like · 1 person
Pravar Mahajan And there is no sanctity about male lineage, as the author has tried to prove. Even females carry the harmful mutations from father. Although, the author has tried to dodge this argument by stating the Y-chromosome is carried intact by the males. Yes, this is right, but I wonder how this helps authors case. This is so, because the Y-chromosome is intact from father, and hence there is no 'amplification' of the harmful factors because of the risk of getting same mutations from the mother. Inbreeding is harmful for precisely the reason that we may have an amplification of harmful mutations if we get it from both mother and father. Hence, this argument fails
Yesterday at 4:17am · Like · 1 person
Pravar Mahajan The author has conveniently ignored that point that the Y-chromosome present in all the males, _in fact_ comes from a single ancestor - The Y-chromosomal Adam.
Yesterday at 4:17am · Like
Pravar Mahajan Just like the Y-chromosome which males get exclusively from our fathers, there is the mitochondrial DNA which we get exclusively from our mothers. So, this further weakens his argument that only male lineage needs to be tracked down.
Yesterday at 4:18am · Like · 2 people
Pravar Mahajan This is just another bullshit way of glorifying ones religion by showing tying its superstitions and myth with modern science. This is not just morally incorrect thing to do, but it also creates a wrong picture of science in minds of people. Such people accept all that which confirms their scriptures (through brutal modifications of scientific facts and reinterpretations of scriptures - of course), but at the same time conveniently reject those scientific ideas which go against their belief systems. This is dangerous.
Yesterday at 4:18am · Like · 2 people
Arjun Ishwar @Pravar : You are preaching to the choir, sir!
9 hours ago · Like · 1 person
Kit Kittappa @Arjun: Thanks for the suggestion. I have posted "there". If someone see a reply, please let me know. I am not subscribing to that blog.
4 hours ago · Like · 1 person
Arjun Ishwar will do sir
3 hours ago · Like
Kit Kittappa Please call me just Kit. Thank you.
3 hours ago · Like
Nikhil Rajagopalan Kit: under what name have you posted? I'd like very much to read ur comments. Also find my reply to his post below
"I'm not buying any of this. I am 100% genetically identical to myself. My brother would have some of my genes as he could have inherited them from my mom or dad. If incest were to happen between a brother and sister, the chances of homozygous recessive lethal genes is very high and the progeny would die (stillbirth or subsequently). As the number of common ancestors relating two people decrease the chances of the above scenario decreases rapidly. One can marry a distantly related cousin by this example. So how will marrying a random member of a population 7 billion strong be considered incestuous? Are you telling me that I am to ditch the love of my life based on this gothra concept; because she would be my "sister"? I laud and appreciate your patience and tolerance of other posters' opinions, but I do not accept your conviction in this matter."
3 hours ago · Like
Kit Kittappa Nikhil, I posted a copy of what I had said here under my name Kit Kittappa.
3 hours ago · Like
Arjun Ishwar Kit: Theres a reply to your post . I am going to paste it here for your convenience
"Cool - you just changed the entire linguistic branching, but sad that you do not know that Ashwathama kunjararaha hatha is also an equally valid Sanskrit sentence"
2 hours ago · Like
Nikhil Rajagopalan Found it!! A paper in the Lancet that says that in Feb 2011, they used a SNP-based microarray that noted the reduced heterozygosity in some children with development issues. This reduced heterozygosity can also be used to determine if the child was born of an incestuous relationship. This can be used to disprove the whole gothram nonsense. Marry two people of the same gothram and get the child tested. If the above is observed in a majority of cases, there may be some inkling of sense in the system. But I doubt that.
2 hours ago · Like · 1 person
Nikhil Rajagopalan Posted at that blog site too."How can anyone justify the origins of this "gothram" system to begin with? It's not like there were an arbitrary number of families at the beginning of time; like the flasks of E.coli in the Lenski experiment. To say that all Brahmins or whoever descended from these express number of families is a tall claim. Secondly how did that number come about? Don't scripture me. :-)
This whole concept revolves around the creation of "families" that bans marriage amongst themselves. This is as ridiculous as saying I can't marry an Indian woman because we are all brothers and sisters. I would do the only smart thing and go for genetic counseling. As my final riposte to you sir, I present you with a paper published in The Lancet (doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(11)60201-8) that says that the child of an incestuous marriage can be noted for lack of heterozygosity. Now for argument sake, let's marry say... a 1000 couples of the same "gothram" together and let's have their children tested. Using standard mathematical confidence levels, if most of the children show mental challenges or otherwise, I'll concede that the "Gothram" system may show some premise. Otherwise I stick to my guns and say it's a load of utter tosh."
about an hour ago · Like · 1 person
Kit Kittappa @AI: Thanks. That guy is trying to ignore Sanskrit grammar. Here is another sentence.
about an hour ago · Like
Kit Kittappa English: I am Aswathama. (Object at end)
Sanskrit: Aham Aswathama (Object at end)
whereas
Hindi: Mein Aswathama hum (Object in the middle)
Tamil: Naan Aswathaman aaven (Object in the middle)
He thinks colloquially when we change the order people still understand and so it would be accepted grammatically or maybe he does not know much Sanskrit except to quote slohams and looking up meaning of every word.
about an hour ago · Like
Vaibhav N Mehta In my opinion the Gothra system was a smart move by our ancestors (very smart for that time). Also, there's actually no proof that this system was created for religious reasons. If you think about it, the people involved in the creation of the Gothra system may not have been religious at all. They probably were scholars who were very practical in their approaches. So when they speak about their theories in public, people who believe start practicing, and over time, these practices turn into religious beliefs. No one challenged the beliefs because the entire society would believe in it (the common man is either too lazy or ignorant about scientific concepts). And even if there was a free-thinking scholar born after 100s of generations, he wouldn't know about the science, because it would be lost in time.
Okay, I think I jumped into a whole new topic all together, sorry! But what I was meaning to say is that the Gothra system was good for those times since the population of the towns/cities people lived in was very insignificant. They had to have a system! They probably formed this system only after watching people suffer and the pravaras were probably the ones that survived such fates (and maybe due to this reason they were named the sons of God). I realize I take various assumptions here, but I am only trying to reason the whole mess out.
As far as the mitochondrial genes are concerned, I think that's the least they could have cared about. Hell, there can be numerous defective genes in the 22 other pairs (same gothra or not). All they aimed for is a healthy penis!
Maybe, it's high time the system is revised, or more appropriately, modernized! It's only painful to imagine how this one might have polluted the minds of common people
51 minutes ago · Like
Nikhil Rajagopalan Or we could marry whomever we want who we know in our (scientific) knowledge are not related to us and not worry about this so called "system".

47 minutes ago · Like
Nikhil Rajagopalan or do the experiment I suggested a few comments up.
46 minutes ago · Like
Vaibhav N Mehta Not caring about the system and marrying would be a very peacefully simple alternative, I would totally do it. Carrying out the experiment as you said would be interesting, but completely unethical.. lol!
40 minutes ago · Like
"Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian"
~ J.B.S.Haldane, on being asked to falsify evolution.
~ J.B.S.Haldane, on being asked to falsify evolution.