The family line.
Ghenghis Khan is supposed to have countless descendents scattered around central and eastern Asia, all full of the genes he scattered so wildly, all those years ago. All these identikit Ghenges and Ghengesses awaiting the call to arms so, once more, they can stream on horseback to avenge their people against the crimes so heinously piled upon them by those barbarians.
Popular lore has absorbed genetics and so exhorts his profligacy and says his genes run true through this now enormous population. Practically a Ghenghis Clohn, as it were.
What utter tripe, though, with no founding in population or any other branch of genetics. Simply, by now, the Ghenghisality of his genome has been so cut up and intermixed with countless other noble and less noble Asian and not so Asian genotypes that his individual genes are probably indiscernible by now. Plus the wheels of the evolutionary machine tick over, resulting in a compositional drift. Same functionality, just mildly altered structures with changes to the codes.
What is utterly clear, however, is that there can be no Ghenges at all other than a general expression of all the common, central Asian genotypes, many of which he must have carried.
This must be the nature of all descendencies, of course. Even by grandchild one individual’s genotype is 75% lost, mixed up, fragmented. It really is no big deal and allows progression, evolution, re-definition, even. Without this continual change we would, of course, still be Gilbert and Sullivan’s primordial sludge. After 4.0 billion years that would have become a bit dull!
Biomedical ecology and other sciences 