A woman in New York City may suddenly acquire the property of being a widow by virtue of the effects that a bullet has just had on some man’s brain in Dodge City, over a thousand miles away. (In the days of the Wild West, there was a revolver nicknamed the Widowmaker. Whether a particular revolver lived up to its nickname on a particular occasion might not be settled by even the most exhaustive examination of the scene of the crime.) The example gets its curious capacity to leap through space and time from the conventional nature of the relationship of marriage, in which a past historical event, a wedding, is deemed to create a permanent relation—a formal relation, not a causal relation—of interest in spite of subsequent wanderings and concrete misfortunes (the accidental loss of a ring, or the destruction of the marriage certificate, for instance).
Mitochondrial Eve is the woman who is the most recent direct ancestor, in the female line, of every human being alive today. We all have mitochondria in our cells, and they are passed to us through the maternal line alone, so all the mitochondria in all the cells in all the people alive today are direct descendants of the mitochondria in the cells of a particular woman, named Mitochondrial Eve by Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan Wilson (1987).
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
