““The parents of a child provided, on average, half the content of that feature; the grandparents, a quarter; the great-grandparents, an eighth-and so forth, all the way back to the most distant ancestor. The sum of all contributions could be described by the series-1/2 + 1/4 +1/8...-all of which conveniently added to 1. Galton called this the Ancestral Law of Heredity. It was a sort of mathematical homunculus-an idea borrowed from Pythagoras and Plato-but dressed up with fractions and denominators into a modern sounding law.””
