Edison Williams

Ancestors

Problems/Questions Profile managers: Edison Williams [send private message] and H. Williams [send private message]

Biography

Guild of One-Name Studies Member 7695

Edison Williams is a descendant of a Texas First Family who settled in the Republic of Texas before February 19, 1846.

Edison Williams is a Project Member of the Texas Project.

Edison Williams is a member of the Threlkeld Name Study Project.

Edison Williams is a member of the Pollard Name Study Project.

Edison Williams is a member of the Horton Name Study Project.

Edison is a member of the National Genealogical Society.

Edison is a member of the Texas State Historical Association.

Edison is a member of the Texas State Genealogical Society.

Edison is a member of the GeneaBloggers Tribe, a genealogy bloggers collective.

Edison is a contributor to the International Society of Genetic Genealogy and the ISOGG Wiki.

Edison is a member of the American Society of Human Genetics.

Edison is a member of the International Society for Computational Biology.

Edison is a member of the International Society for Biomolecular Archaeology.

Edison is a member of the advisory board of the Personal Genomics Foundation.

Interested in a great, broad range of subjects. Alas, master of none.^[1][2]

Random Facts

• Have annoyed many people at several universities^[3]
• Used to do some teaching; that's why I can tend to get all "lecturey" in G2G^[4]
• Worked at both entrepreneurial startups and Fortune 500s; one Fortune 100; one of the entrepreneurial startups grew into a Fortune 1000...all the numbers get confusing
• The profile photo was not taken this year; the beard is heavier and I look much, much younger now
• Published in unexpected places, like Oxford University Press...but absolutely nothing anyone would want to read
• Speaking of, one of the few people I know who owns a hardcopy of the full Oxford English Dictionary...all 16 volumes and 42 shelf-inches of it (1st edition, 1978; a shame the 1989 2nd edition was the last that will ever see physical print; yep: word-nerd)
• Owned a book publishing company for a decade and, perforce, got a grounding in copyright, permissions, and publication rights
• Have a set of seal-of-office cufflinks given to me by a former Vice President of the United States
• Manage the Guild-registered Threlkeld One-Name Study, and here on WikiTree; also the Guild-registered Pollard One-Name Study and the Horton study on WikiTree
• Administrator for the McCollough, Pollard, Teasley, and Threlkeld Surname DNA Projects at Family Tree DNA
• Blog at CountingChromosomes.com; the plan was for it to become a blog/podcast combo... A podlog? blogcast? Maybe just blast? But, alas, my word-count has gone to G2G, not my blog, and that notion was abandoned
• Contributing editor to the International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG); brief bio at ISOGG
• Member of the advisory board of the Personal Genomics Foundation, and member of the American Society of Human Genetics, the International Society for Computational Biology, and the International Society for Biomolecular Archaeology
• Once had dinner with both James Watson and Francis Crick...well, along with a bunch of other people; I was just an undergrad and it was a college departmental thing
• Every time I think I can finally spell "DNA," I learn something I didn't know
• I share 98.7% of my protein-coding DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos; share 85% with mice; share 60% with fruit flies; but most impressive of all is that I share at least 41% of my coding DNA with bananas^[5]
• I am not completely human; I'm only about 43%-45% human^[6]

Most Memorable Quotations

"I started out highlighting all the quotable passages in this blog post. I gave up when I noticed that most of the text was being highlighted."
       —Elizabeth Shown Mills (CG, CGL, FASG, FNGS), writing on
           11 September 2018 about my blog post,
           "Genetic Genealogy and the Dunning-Kruger Effect"

"Sources err. Sources quibble. Sources exaggerate. Sources misremember. Sources are biased. Sources have egos and ideologies.... There are no historical resources we can simply trust. There are no records whose riddles we do not have to thoughtfully decipher.... As careful researchers, we cannot apply an easy, generic label—reliable or unreliable—to any document, much less any type of document."
       —Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence Explained, Third Edition Revised

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
       —Eske Willerslev, GeoGenetics Centre, University of Copenhagen

"Hominem unius libri timeo; not only to the man of one book, but also to the man of one idea, in whom the sense of proportion is lacking, and who sees only that for which he looks."
       —Edward Everett

"One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you're right, but not knowing enough about a subject to know you're wrong."
       —Neil deGrasse Tyson

"The creative mind flourishes best when it is apparently wasting time. Shakespeare, we are told, was habitually idle between plays."
       —J. Robert Oppenheimer

"It cannot be said too often: all life is one."
       —Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

"DNA doesn't lie, but it can mislead. It's like consulting an accurate but cryptic and mischievous oracle. It often answers questions other than the one we think we asked, and it usually says a good deal less than we wish it did. A whole industry of sketchy interpreters surrounds the oracle, profiting from the confusion of the seekers."
       —Herbert Tardy

"Ed Williams is the most serious man in the world. His frown lines have frown lines. Clint Eastwood learned to squint menacingly from watching him. Ed has a black T-shirt with an arrow pointing at his face that says, 'I'm with the nihilist.' When he's in a cheerful mood, he listens to Orff's Carmina Burana. He considers Søren Kierkegaard to have been a stand-up comedian. Webster's Dictionary has his photo beside the word 'dour.'

"Oh... Wait. No. No, I'm thinking of somebody else. Never mind."
       —Anonymous

Sources

1. ↑ First-hand information, entered by Ed Williams. Don't implicitly trust his memory, though. It used to be very good, but his tally of functional neurons and glial cells ain't what it used to be. And, at the end of the day, he is a 41% coding-DNA match to a banana.
2. ↑ The sentence, "Alas, master of none," is not entirely accurate. Ed has been to every continent except Antarctica and used to travel quite a bit for work. Ed is/was an expert at napping on airplanes. The degree of expertise in this activity may have diminished in the past several years, however, because the amount of travel has decreased. Current areas of bona fide expertise include both sitting in recliners and the one-handed operation of Kindle eReaders.
3. ↑ Ed's tendency to annoy is not limited to any particular time in his life. He remains efficient at it, though perhaps not a true expert. As a refresher of his outdated academic studies he took a few post-grad courses and labs in human genetics in 2018-19 at the University of Houston, where the other students at first mistook him to be a visiting professor emeritus...or perhaps just a homeless guy who had somehow managed to wander into the lecture hall. Ed was a decade or so older than the teacher. All indications are that he was quickly able to annoy even his fellow students because no one wanted to be his lab partner...some sotto voce comments about not pairing with someone who might have actually known Gregor Mendel. Which admittedly surprised Ed. Because he hadn't yet even begun throwing references to movies and TV shows of the '70s and '80s.
4. ↑ Empirical evidence points to Ed as having, by a large margin, the highest per-post average word count on G2G. He can't write a simple grocery shopping list on fewer than two sheets of paper. Typed. Single spaced. Get him started trying to explain something about DNA and he can go on for an interminably painful amount of time. Perhaps no one else writing on G2G continuously runs up against the post limit of 12,000 characters. Perhaps few others even know that there is a 12,000 character limit.
   
   An examination of random posts completed between August 2021 and August 2023 showed he had an average word count of 612. Adjusted for a 15% margin of error, that would be 520 words per post. As of October 2023, Ed has written 2,887 combined G2G questions, answers, and comments, which then tallies to approximately 1.5 million words written. To put that loquaciously irritating number into perspective:
   • All seven of the Harry Potter books combined: 1,084,170 words
   • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: 587,287 words
   • Total in The Lord of the Rings trilogy plus The Hobbit: 576,459 words
   • Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand: 561,996 words
   • Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry: 365,712 words
   • The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: 364,153 words
     
   
   Note: This source citation has recently come under additional scrutiny, and it has been hypothesized, though as yet unconfirmed, that Ed was the inspiration for a brief dialog exchange in the movie The French Dispatch (released 22 October 2021; directed by Wes Anderson; screenplay by Wes Anderson; story by Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, and Jason Schwartzman). In a scene of an editorial meeting early in the movie was this bit of dialog:
   

   Story Editor: "We asked for twenty-five hundred words, and she came in at fourteen thousand, plus footnotes, endnotes, a glossary, and two epilogues."

   Arthur Howitzer Jr. (played by Bill Murray): (Sighs) "It's one of her best."
   

   Screenplay writer and director Wes Anderson has not yet commented on whether he knows Ed Williams, or whether this brief passage in the film was directed at him in a sarcastic manner.
5. ↑ Sano Genetics, "Are We Genetically Similar to Bananas and Why is this Important for Research in Disease?" Sano Genetics Blog, 30 Nov 2019 (https://sanogenetics.com/blog/are-we-genetically-similar-to-bananas-and-why-is-this-important-for-research-in-disease/ : accessed 30 Mar 2020). But, no: Ed does not begin to display large brown spots after a few days sitting in a fruit bowl. In the spirit of full disclosure, however, Ed has never sat in a fruit bowl for longer than an hour or so; we have no empirical, peer-reviewed evidence regarding extended-duration brown spots.
6. ↑ Crisp, Alastair, Chiara Boschetti, Malcolm Perry, Alan Tunnacliffe, and Gos Micklem. "Expression of Multiple Horizontally Acquired Genes Is a Hallmark of Both Vertebrate and Invertebrate Genomes." Genome Biology 16, no. 1 (March 13, 2015): 50. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-015-0607-3. The Crisp, et al., publication clearly refers to the microbiome and the number of bacteria and viruses extant within every human being. However, people who have known Ed for over 30 years resolutely attest that 43%-45% microbial content alone cannot account for the degree of weirdness consistently displayed, that there is something more than that going on in the not-quite-human department.