No Kings

Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics. But virtue must be vigilant lest it become tyranny. -John Adams, Discourses on Davila This Saturday (10/18/25), Portland filled with 40,000 protesters. The “No Kings March” is meant to remind those in power that sovereignty belongs toContinue reading “No Kings”

The Wadhams Surname

In Genetics and New England Pathology, I sketched a possible line to medieval England to illustrate a simpler truth from population genetics: the number of ancestral positions doubles geometrically, while the number of people who actually left you DNA shrinks via pedigree collapse. From this follows an unsettling comfort: living humans are orders of magnitudeContinue reading “The Wadhams Surname”

The Barker Surname

My Uncle Tony recalled that his grandmother, Lucy Burr Wadhams, thought of her husband [Abram Barker] as a “Johnny-come-lately” without the deep historical connection to America (and Goshen specifically) of her lineage. My Uncle Tony mused that the family name was associated with a carnival barker, yet it seems more likely that the surname derived fromContinue reading “The Barker Surname”