Tree of Knowledge
What do family trees have to do with race?
New from my column in Takimag.com:
Tree of Knowledge
Steve Sailer
June 04, 2025Genealogy is a popular hobby, but the concept of the family tree has attracted remarkably little highbrow thinking in recent centuries.
Yet, the family tree is one of the most philosophically interesting entities imaginable. It seems hypothetical, like something Plato might have dreamed up. And yet it’s very real. Every human being who has ever lived, at least so far, has had a mother and a father; a maternal grandmother and grandfather and a paternal grandmother and grandfather; and so on, ad infinitum, back millions of years into our mammalian past.
Weirdly, Western intellectuals seldom think about the implications of family trees, even though they are as fundamental to human reality as anything can be.
For example, in philosophy, the term “genealogy” is traditionally used only in a metaphorical sense as a jargon term for skeptically tracing the history of ideas, as in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality and Foucault’s recounting of the evolution of European criminal justice from capital and corporal punishment to imprisonment in Discipline and Punish.
Likewise, the main use of the term “family tree” among academics is to track teacher-student relationships, such as Socrates-Plato-Aristotle.
Thus, it’s depressingly common for people who think of themselves as educated to assert that race does not exist, when race is instead obviously about who is in your family tree.
Read the whole thing there.
The beginning of this article, where Steve mentions the interest of academcis in "family trees," reminded me of the Mathematical Genealogy Project, which has a website enabling users to trace the dissertation adviser(s) of thousands of mathematicians, contemporary and past. It's fascinating to see how many well known 20th and 21st century Europenan and American mathematicians have illustrious mathematical ancestors like Gauss and Leibniz (who is a mathematical ancestor of Gauss). For example, if you trace John von Neumann's mathematical ancestry back six generations, you land on Gauss. The same happens for Paul Erdos. The eccentric Russian Fields Medal winner, Grigori Perelman, who refused the monetary award, has Lobachesvsky (of Tom Lehrer fame) as a mathematical ancestor. I suppose the lines of lesser known mathematicians die out more frequently. They perhaps have fewer and less talented descendants.
Saxon royal families were very into tracing their bloodlines from Woden or Thor, but this was discouraged by Christian monks. One theory for why Anglo-Saxon England amalgamated relatively quickly is the high level of prestige attached to royal bloodlines, so that when one went extinct it seemed natural for a neighbouring king to absorb its dominions (rather than elevate a non-royal lacking divine ancestry).