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Stark men are not so Stark


Corvo the Crow

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On 10/9/2017 at 3:25 PM, Banner Without Brothers said:

Personally I think it shows that all the stuff about bloodlines is a load of misdirection and people put way too much stock in those ideas.

I agree.

For near relatives, looks are relevant—obviously so in the case of Robert's children, since it's a major plot point, and presumably Jon looking like Arya who looks like Lyanna is a clue. But I don't think we're meant to assume that means anything implausibly long-term, like that if Bran's ancestors 8000 years ago didn't look that much like him they really aren't his ancestors.

Even in seemingly magical cases, I think blood usually isn't involved. For example, "There must always be a Stark in Winterfell" could be the remnant of an ancient lost prophecy—someone foresaw that the first time in the future there wasn't a Stark in Winterfell, the castle was sacked and burned. For that prophecy to work, it wouldn't matter whether the people in Winterfell over the intervening millennia were patrilineal descendants, or >X% Stark, or >Y% First Men—only that they all used the Stark name. Or if Brandon the Builder made some magical deal with the Children on behalf of House Stark, anyone claiming the rights and honors of House Stark has to live up to that deal, no matter how little of Brandon's blood he has or how matrilineal it is.

The one big question, however, is the Targaryens. If it's true that only Targaryens (and Velaryons) can ride dragons, there has to be a reason. GRRM himself has said that Dany's generation has only a small fraction of the blood of Aegon, and that's with an intensive inbreeding program. How much blood could even Aegon have left from the original dragonlords 5000 years ago?*

But then even this may not be about blood and genes. The dragonseeds are in the story for a reason. Maybe Nettles has no dragonlord blood, as she appears, meaning the whole idea is superstition and/or propaganda. On the other hand, if she does have enough dragonlord blood, that shows that there are probably tens of thousands of people who are "Valyrian enough" to ride a dragon even if they don't look remotely like it** and don't have a pedigree.

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* Of course there are ways you could make it work. For example, maybe it's not a matter of having enough of the magical blood of the old dragonlords, it's just a matter of smelling (literally, or in some magical sense) similar to the person who hatched a particular dragon. Most dragonriders attune to dragons that were hatched by an uncle or a grandfather, not an ancient ancestor, so we're talking about 25% genes instead of a near-homeopathic fraction.

** The dragonseeds definitely show that, contrary to what some people in-universe and on these forums seem to assume, purple eyes and dragonriding are clearly not genetically or magically linked.

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We know that Ned looks like Jon and Arya, thus he looks like the Starks. 

The Karstarks separated many thousands of years ago in the male line anyway.

i think it is VERY possible that Starkness is passed on via the FEMALE line, and I rther think that the King of Winter is in fact passed on just like the old celtic method ie from Uncle to nephew

The female line matters so the KoW is the eldest son of the eldest girl. When the King of Winter dies his son does not inherit but the son of his eldest sister does.  This was the old Pictish inheritance method of which GRRM would be very well aware.

Thus Lynara Starks if she had had one would have been the previous KoW, but since she had no brother the brother of her mother (A flint) would have been the KoW.

Since Lyanna had just one son (probably) the next KoW would be the son of her sister Brana id she has one or the son of her daughter if she has one.

Now Mitochondrial DNA is passed on ONLY via the femalie line (OK there may be occassional odd ball exceptions, but basic gnetic history assumes passed mother to child. Thus this element of Starkenss may be mother related.

Not how many times we see stark girls marrying starks ie matching the female line with the male line. It is not incest as for the Targs, but still a lot of cousin/second cousin marriages.

However there is also the stark NAME which we assume is Y chromosome inheritance.

I suspect BOTH are important.

With the Bael the Bard story I am assuming that Bael was himself a Stark descendant - possibly a bastard from one of the many Starks on the wall or perhaps from a marriage to a deserter. Sir names do not seem to be used much in the Wilding society.

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1 hour ago, Luddagain said:

i think it is VERY possible that Starkness is passed on via the FEMALE line, and I rther think that the King of Winter is in fact passed on just like the old celtic method ie from Uncle to nephew.

The female line matters so the KoW is the eldest son of the eldest girl. When the King of Winter dies his son does not inherit but the son of his eldest sister does.  This was the old Pictish inheritance method of which GRRM would be very well aware.

Even if that were true for the Kings of Winter, we know it isn't true for the Lords of Winterfell, or for the Kings in the North before them. So, we're talking about thousands of years where the "wrong" person has been in Winterfell, almost certainly without the mitochondrial DNA. Even if the matrilineal line hasn't died out, the "right" King of Winter is as likely to be some Norrey tribesman whose family haven't been connected to nobility for millennia as it is to be anyone named Stark. (In fact, the current Starks are probably even less likely than most other Northerners, because their mother is a Tully.)

Sure, there are a few Stark men who married cousins, nieces, etc.—but there are a whole lot more who married Lockes, Norreys, Flints, Glovers, and even southron houses like Royces and Blackwoods. And once there's a single outmarriage, future Stark cousins don't have the mitochondria any more than the main branch of the family, so marrying them wouldn't help anyway. The only way to get it back would be by the wild coincidence of one of those Manderly wives or whoever happening to be a direct matrilineal descendant via a genealogy that nobody in-world could possibly know. And then the next outmarriage—or even the next cousin marriage to a cousin who isn't descended from that Manderly—and it's lost again and needs another fantastic coincidence to bring it back.

So, there's almost certainly no "Starkness" in the Starks. There's a small chance of some Starkness somewhere in the world, but no way anyone could find it.

Besides, whose magical DNA would they be passing down anyway? The wife of Bran the Builder, who's never even been mentioned, and who we have no reason to suspect had any magical abilities?

What would be the point in GRRM writing this into the story?

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4 hours ago, Luddagain said:

snip

 

2 hours ago, falcotron said:

snip

Arya and Alys look exactly alike to give even Jon a pause, he is only able to discern her through her age and not at a glance.

Alys looks like Arya who looks like Lyanna. Arya looks like Jon who looks like Ned.

Besides the possibility of some recent unknown common ancestor, these houses are a thousand years removed and yet they share these similarities. Lords of Winterfell and some recent Kings of the North also share the same face as seen from the statues so there is a shared "Starkness"

But while the females look exactly alike the males don't look at all like eachother. Karstark men not looking like the Stark's can't just be their beards and being big men.Brandon the Burned was also big and Bran has seen the statues, with the exception of collapsed older lower levels, if Karstarks and Stark males looked alike they wouldn't have been so alien to him. Just look at the example of Jon seeing Alys for the first time.

Stark features are obviously kept even some thousand years past to be manifested in both Alys and Arya.

Mitochondrial DNA wouldn't be the answer since as far as we know Karstarks have an unbroken male line. So no mtDNA retained. Chromosome X also can't be the answer unless they marry cousins from the female line every couple of generations or so.So the "Starkness" must mostly be determined from autosomes which somehow always pass on but with Chromosome Y also having a special effect which the Starks presumably lack so their men and Karstark men don't look alike even hundreds of years back while Starks of both gender share looks with Karstark females, which also lack Y, even after a thousand years.

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@Corvo the Crow I completely agree. The other thing to consider is the MRCA (most recent common ancestor). In the real world Europeans MRCA would probably be about 1000 years ago. For the entire population of our entire planet it would only be 3000 years ago. For a continent like Westeros with a much smaller population, much more internal migration, etc. We have to imagine it would be much less. This means that Westerosi would most certainly all be related from peasant to the highest. Obviously that doesn't mean they all share genetic traits. Like a glass of water there's a finite amount it can hold some genes would be discarded along the way. The point being that while The Starks can't lay claim to being particularly Stark as in having genes that would be very similar to any possible night king or anyone in the age of heroes, at the same time everyone is a little bit Stark and related to them somewhere probably less than 1000 years ago in Westerosi history. Same goes for all the major houses. 

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@Banner Without Brothers  First of all, I can't help but say I really liked the name :D

What you say is definitely true, yet somehow even with all the new genes added to and removed from the "Stark"s over generations, they keep on their appearance. Same also suggested for most other noble families though some may have lost their appearance over time. One example would be Waynwoods, their men are horse faced (won't quote, WoW sample) and guess whose genes have been introduced to them?

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"No," Catelyn agreed. "You must name another heir, until such time as Jeyne gives you a son." She considered a moment. "Your father's father had no siblings, but his father had a sister who married a younger son of Lord Raymar Royce, of the junior branch. They had three daughters, all of whom wed Vale lordlings. A Waynwood and a Corbray, for certain. The youngest . . . it might have been a Templeton, but . . ."

Some of them even have the brown hair.

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Let's go back to the start. Your entire evidence is that, although the Stark look actually isn't preserved over hundreds of years (or even a single generation) for any of the men, it does seem to be for Arya Stark and Alys Karstark.

But that's not actually surprising. Haven't you ever seen two people who are no more closely related than being from the same ethnic group who look pretty similar? Why does Pink look like a smaller version of Brigitte Nielsen? Does she secretly have some Danish ancestry that connects her up to the only semi-famous ancestor of Brigitte's whose name we've heard of?

And why do you think there would be a scientifically plausible explanation in the first place? GRRM didn't come up with thousands of years worth of family trees that he's keeping hidden from us and then feed them into a simplified genetics algorithm like the one from the Crusader Kings games to get the look of his characters. He decided that Alys looking similar to Arya would be interesting for the story and not too implausible to believe. I doubt he came up with any deeper explanation beyond that, because, why would he?

Also:

7 hours ago, Corvo the Crow said:

Some of them even have the brown hair.

When there's only four or five hair colors, two people having the most common one is not surprising. George W. Bush and Tony Blair didn't just both have brown hair, they had the same brown hair color (and even both went grey around the same time).

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11 hours ago, Banner Without Brothers said:

The other thing to consider is the MRCA (most recent common ancestor). In the real world Europeans MRCA would probably be about 1000 years ago. For the entire population of our entire planet it would only be 3000 years ago. For a continent like Westeros with a much smaller population, much more internal migration, etc. We have to imagine it would be much less. This means that Westerosi would most certainly all be related from peasant to the highest.

But then the Andals came, and then the Rhoynar, and Westerosi mate with Essosi from time to time- even the nobility.  Which is interesting because the Free Cities were slave trading centers , or sanctuaries for slaves, courtesy of the Valyrian freehold , which spanned a continent. Pretty much anyone from the Free Cities ought to be like a genetic piñata for the Westeros gene pool.

Westerosi - Essosi travel and intermingling should account for a great deal of variability in that MRCE calculation, mayhaps?

 

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48 minutes ago, Reekazoid said:

But then the Andals came, and then the Rhoynar, and Westerosi mate with Essosi from time to time- even the nobility.  Which is interesting because the Free Cities were slave trading centers , or sanctuaries for slaves, courtesy of the Valyrian freehold , which spanned a continent. Pretty much anyone from the Free Cities ought to be like a genetic piñata for the Westeros gene pool.

Westerosi - Essosi travel and intermingling should account for a great deal of variability in that MRCE calculation, mayhaps?

In real-world Europe, there's the Alans, Huns, Magyar, Mongols, etc. And the various eras where Europe was cross-fertilizing with Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt, especially the larger-scale migrations of Jews, Armenians, and others under eastern Rome, and the later Turkish conquest of the Balkans. And the Carthaginians and later the Arabs mixed with north Africans before bringing even more new blood into Europe. And so on.

Westeros, by comparison, had one largish migration millennia ago and a much smaller and more localized one more recently, and that's it. That's not even remotely comparable to Europe. That's not even comparable to England.

If you want to account for Westerosi-Essosi mingling, the easiest way to do that is to just look at the MRCA for Westeros plus western Essos as a single gene pool. But even they don't have anything remotely like Europe's external migration either. Their equivalent to the steppe border has so little migration that the arrival of the Dothraki 400 years ago was an extraordinary event, and they don't even have an equivalent to West Asia or to North Africa.

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On 10/10/2017 at 0:25 AM, Banner Without Brothers said:

There's a Jon line somewhere where he thinks about the validity of a Karstark claim to Winterfell. He says something like All the houses of the North have been married to the Starks so many times that any of their claims woulds be just as valid. 

Personally I think it shows that all the stuff about bloodlines is a load of misdirection and people put way too much stock in those ideas. Just think about the author, he's a hippy. The two ideologies that stand out to me that would care about bloodlines would be feudalism and nazism. Two ideologies that I suspect the author doesn't have too high an opinion of.

THANK YOU!

I positively hate it when people on these forums start their Glorious Northern Master Race (TM) or Glorious Pure Stark Bloodline that keeps the Others at bay (TM) bullshit.
It's not only fucking creepy and wrong from a modern perspective, it also undercuts a lot of the themes of the story itself.

It's why "There must always be a Stark at Winterfell" is bullshit as well.  
 

On 10/12/2017 at 0:18 AM, Colonel Green said:

 

3)  How does Sansa have connection to bats?  There was one instance where a story told about her involved her having bat wings, nothing more.

In one of the books she did something at the Hour of the Bat, and because some people think that every word in this story is foreshadowing for something, they think she has a connection to bats.

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14 hours ago, falcotron said:

Let's go back to the start. Your entire evidence is that, although the Stark look actually isn't preserved over hundreds of years (or even a single generation) for any of the men, it does seem to be for Arya Stark and Alys Karstark.

But that's not actually surprising. Haven't you ever seen two people who are no more closely related than being from the same ethnic group who look pretty similar? Why does Pink look like a smaller version of Brigitte Nielsen? Does she secretly have some Danish ancestry that connects her up to the only semi-famous ancestor of Brigitte's whose name we've heard of?

And why do you think there would be a scientifically plausible explanation in the first place? GRRM didn't come up with thousands of years worth of family trees that he's keeping hidden from us and then feed them into a simplified genetics algorithm like the one from the Crusader Kings games to get the look of his characters. He decided that Alys looking similar to Arya would be interesting for the story and not too implausible to believe. I doubt he came up with any deeper explanation beyond that, because, why would he?

Also:

When there's only four or five hair colors, two people having the most common one is not surprising. George W. Bush and Tony Blair didn't just both have brown hair, they had the same brown hair color (and even both went grey around the same time).

All good points and fine, I especially liked the CK2 mention that you've thrown in, since I really love the game and sunk over a thousand hours into it logged to steam and perhaps another thousand and a half with no internet connection, but there's this, while the points you give are very much true for real life and also makes sense to apply for Westeros, it somehow doesn't. Great houses mostly keeping their looks over generations and even milennia is an important plot point. At least it was at the time of the first book, or else there wouldn't be a book called "The "Lineages and Histories of the Great Houses of the Seven Kingdoms, With Descriptions of Many High Lords and Noble Ladies and Their Children" by a character called Grand Maester Malleon who is dead for some hundred years past.

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The seed is strong, Jon Arryn had cried on his deathbed, and so it was. All those bastards, all with hair as black as night. Grand Maester Malleon recorded the last mating between stag and lion, some ninety years ago, when Tya Lannister wed Gowen Baratheon, third son of the reigning lord. Their only issue, an unnamed boy described in Malleon's tome as a large and lusty lad born with a full head of black hair, died in infancy. Thirty years before that a male Lannister had taken a Baratheon maid to wife. She had given him three daughters and a son, each black-haired. No matter how far back Ned searched in the brittle yellowed pages, always he found the gold yielding before the coal.

No matter how far he goes back would be around 300 years at most but still it is there, Baratheons are black for 300 years and Lannisters gold for at least 300 years, going as far back as Lann the Clever if his blondeness is not a later addition.

Again, another example of the genes of the great houses forcing themselves on the phenotypes would be Tyrion-Tysha. While Tyrion(a chimera) has pale-blond and black hair and mismatched eyes, he's a Lannister. Lanna, daughter of sailor's wife, a prostitute who only beds those who marry her, is a fourteen year old prostitute with golden hair who costs thrice the amount of any others. Obviously she is Tyrion's daughter  and despite gold yielding to coal for Lannister-Baratheon marriages, when a Lannister, even though he is a chimera with black hair also, marries a commoner with dark hair the result we get is Lannister colored offspring.

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Oddly enough in our real world the Y chromosomes are passed on down the male line virtually unchanged while female mitochondria are passes from female to all children with little change..

So if we assume (other than the Bael story) that the stark line went from father to son then the current stark boys have the SAME Y chromosome as Brandon the Builder. Just as guys on this site have the same Y chromosome as some long gone  grandfather.

Now with the girls it is different 

We know nothing of the earlier generations but it is reasonable to assume that some stark daughters went into all of the early houses and ESPECIALLY the Blackwoods. If female DNA matters then it could be anywhere but should that DNA ever be reunited with a stark then perhaps then you get special warging ability.

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4 hours ago, Orphalesion said:

I positively hate it when people on these forums start their Glorious Northern Master Race (TM) or Glorious Pure Stark Bloodline that keeps the Others at bay (TM) bullshit.

(but so funny if at the end, stark's bloodline is revealed as originally bastard ^^)

To answer to the question, I'm not convinced with the pertinence of chromosomic considerations. We are speaking of a litterar world with inner coherence, and in the world of ASOIAF blood is strongly reliated to what we call "magic" : dragon's blood, wolf's blood, lion's blood, raven's blood, bear's blood, and so on... Skinchangers, with time, are taking appearance of their beast-companion. Targaryen can give birth to babies with leather wings and scales. The curious think about the Stark is that no one is "wolfic". The typical physical trait is horse-like, or bear-like.  

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4 hours ago, GloubieBoulga said:

(but so funny if at the end, stark's bloodline is revealed as originally bastard ^^)

To answer to the question, I'm not convinced with the pertinence of chromosomic considerations. We are speaking of a litterar world with inner coherence, and in the world of ASOIAF blood is strongly reliated to what we call "magic" : dragon's blood, wolf's blood, lion's blood, raven's blood, bear's blood, and so on... Skinchangers, with time, are taking appearance of their beast-companion. Targaryen can give birth to babies with leather wings and scales. The curious think about the Stark is that no one is "wolfic". The typical physical trait is horse-like, or bear-like.  

Inglorious Bastard Inferior Northern Race (TM)?

Isn't being horse faced is having a somewhat elongated face? Wolves' faces are like that too but it is easier to compare it to a horse's face since it's easier to discernit  with it going upwards-downwards.

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10 hours ago, Luddagain said:

Oddly enough in our real world the Y chromosomes are passed on down the male line virtually unchanged while female mitochondria are passes from female to all children with little change..

So if we assume (other than the Bael story) that the stark line went from father to son then the current stark boys have the SAME Y chromosome as Brandon the Builder. Just as guys on this site have the same Y chromosome as some long gone  grandfather.

But why would you assume Bael the Bard is the only time in 8000 years that the name passed matrilineally? We see the same thing happening to other houses multiple times in the backstory. (And, unlike most real-world cultures, the dynasty seems to always keep the same name when it passes through a woman, instead of doing so only rarely, so the fact that they're still named Stark doesn't mean anything.)

Meanwhile, Y chromosomes from powerful families pass into other families even more easily than mitochrondial DNA. Even if we didn't have the statistics to prove that, it should be pretty obvious. Cadets usually remain powerful men for at least a generation, but not forever, so they're spreading the same Y chromosomes out widely. And of course powerful men have more adulterous affairs (and/or more polygamy, depending on the society), but powerful men's daughters don't. And so on.

So, if there's enough Bran the Builder DNA out there for it to have coincidentally gotten back into the Stark line after even one break in the patrilineal line, much less the larger number of breaks there almost certainly are, then it's probably in hundreds of other families, meaning there's nothing special about the Starks.

For example, in the genetic study of Genghis Khan's descendants, it turns out that many of the dynasties in Asia have Genghisid DNA (as do about 16 million other men), but the correlation between the ones who claim it and the ones who actually have it gets pretty weak after the first few centuries. (There are even dynasties that claim matrilineal descent but not patrilineal, who turn out to be wrong on both counts.) And we're talking 8000 years for Brandon the Builder rather than 900. 

So, if you want to claim that the Starks have special blood by appealing to real-world genetics, it ends up proving the opposite.

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12 hours ago, Corvo the Crow said:

All good points and fine, I especially liked the CK2 mention that you've thrown in, since I really love the game and sunk over a thousand hours into it logged to steam and perhaps another thousand and a half with no internet connection

I can recognize, and empathize with, the signs of someone who's so addicted that he has to work out the appropriate multiplier for his Steam statistics. :)

12 hours ago, Corvo the Crow said:

while the points you give are very much true for real life and also makes sense to apply for Westeros, it somehow doesn't.

People keep appealing to real-world genetics to try to explain Stark Magic, and then falling back on "Well, Westeros obviously doesn't have real-world genetics" when real-world genetics give the opposite answer to what they wanted.

There may well be some different rule of fantasy genetics at work here that we could puzzle out from the story. But it's far more likely that there is no rule, and GRRM just made up each case separately. And that means we can't try to extrapolate from the cases he gave us to ones we don't know about.

It's like trying to work out the in-world etymology of the name Robert. There are related names like Robar, and different frequencies of those names in the history we have, and they're split among First Men and Andals in a certain way, and so on, and those are all the same clues that we can use to figure out that English Robert came from a Norman French borrowing from the Frankish version of the original name *Hrōþiberhtaz. But in Westeros, they aren't actually clues. GRRM didn't devise a history of the name, he just completely arbitrarily sprinkled in stuff like Robar because it looks realistic and meaningful even when it isn't, which increases the verisimilitude of his world.

12 hours ago, Corvo the Crow said:

Great houses mostly keeping their looks over generations and even milennia is an important plot point.

No, some Great Houses keeping their hair color for a few centuries is an important plot point. One that GRRM has said was "probably a mistake". So, it doesn't seem likely that he's going to duplicate it to all features of all houses and multiply it by a factor of ten in later books.

And that's especially so for the Starks, given that they're one of the cases where he went out of his way to show us that it doesn't work. Going back to the original post in this thread, the kings in the crypt stop looking recognizably Stark to Bran pretty quickly, and the Karstark men don't look like the Stark men, and of course none of Ned's boys look Starkish. That's all perfectly reasonable in real life. The only way there's a puzzle is if you assume that things must work the opposite of real life, but then there must be some secret clue that explains, via real-world genetics, why it turns out the same as real life anyway. That's just inventing an unsolvable problem to solve that isn't actually there in the series. Why do that?

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9 hours ago, falcotron said:

People keep appealing to real-world genetics to try to explain Stark Magic, and then falling back on "Well, Westeros obviously doesn't have real-world genetics" when real-world genetics give the opposite answer to what they wanted.

There may well be some different rule of fantasy genetics at work here that we could puzzle out from the story. But it's far more likely that there is no rule, and GRRM just made up each case separately. And that means we can't try to extrapolate from the cases he gave us to ones we don't know about.

No, some Great Houses keeping their hair color for a few centuries is an important plot point. One that GRRM has said was "probably a mistake". So, it doesn't seem likely that he's going to duplicate it to all features of all houses and multiply it by a factor of ten in later books.

And that's especially so for the Starks, given that they're one of the cases where he went out of his way to show us that it doesn't work. Going back to the original post in this thread, the kings in the crypt stop looking recognizably Stark to Bran pretty quickly, and the Karstark men don't look like the Stark men, and of course none of Ned's boys look Starkish. That's all perfectly reasonable in real life. The only way there's a puzzle is if you assume that things must work the opposite of real life, but then there must be some secret clue that explains, via real-world genetics, why it turns out the same as real life anyway. That's just inventing an unsolvable problem to solve that isn't actually there in the series. Why do that?

Aside from the GRRM admitting it was a mistake, which I have just learned, real life genetics does seem to work for Westeros in some distorted way. When I said what you said makes sense to apply but somehow doesn't, what I had in mind is not something like  "real life genetics work but actually they don't so yeah, magic".

In real life, most genetic information has, as far as we know, a roughly equal chance to be passed on to offspring, but some have higher chances than the roughly %50 and in time they keep on existing and have increasing numbers in a population while their allelles are getting less frequent. So say, if the Stark horse face trait has %60 chance against say, a weasal face, then if the individual carries both of these, he'll pass to his children stark horse face trait %60 of the time and %40 of the time they'll get the weasal face. Not in phenotype but in genotype.

What is in the boks may just be this but not in a higher than usual but still not so high like %55-45 but, really high like perhaps %70-30 in some traits. So with this, Starks would have kept their looks with a genetical explanation over millennias and even spread them like in Waynwoods. With Alys and Arya looking alike, this would further support it if it were not a work of fiction but real life.

With these in consideration Stark men are still carrying the genes at the time of the Stark-Karstark split, so they are still "Genetically Stark" they are just not "Genetically Stark Male" due to lack of the Stark Y.

 

Again for a comparison with a family with a broken male line, Lannisters still cary their golden hair which Lann the Clever supposedly had. So maybe their Y chromosome wasn't carrying anything that sets them apart or maybe just as it was with the Starks, it was also important but is now lost to history.

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i think this is a stretch. arya and lyanna and jon look like ned too, so if they look like the old starks then so does ned but he is used as evidence to the opposite.

also I think the look passing on is a myth, we don't hear about a heap of portraits, they don't have the technology to have a great record of what people actually looked like. I wouldn't even put too much power into the lineage book. the stark statues... well, there's many great works that don't really resemble the person exactly or even well at all. art was romanticised, features changed to be appropriate.

Also the areas have mainly had children with the same area and families, this is going to keep certain things coming back again and again. Most northerners have brown hair.

People say the Stark kids look more like Catelyn, but bran and rickon are really young and features change for kids. they could have many features but different colouring. As already said Bran thought that young Benjen could be him. all the auburn hair with the starks kids shows me is that ned carries the red hair gene.

black is a dominant colour, not a shock it would be prevalent in the Baratheon line especially with marrying cousins and possibly to same vessels over and over again. there could have been some with dark brown hair or just brown hair that have been lost in time, I can imagine a description of dark hair could realistically be assumed black because people expect that. 

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  • 3 months later...
On ‎10‎/‎9‎/‎2017 at 7:10 AM, Corvo the Crow said:

But Karstark females, look exactly like the Stark ones, it is the male Starks and Karstarks that don't look like each other and even then there are some similarities between members. Alys looks like Arya who looks like Lyanna, Arya and Jon, presumably son of Lyanna, look like each other too which means Jon and Alys may also look like each other and their description makes me think they do.

What Bran sees as the old kings of winter in his dream doesn't match any Starks in the story (well Brandon the Burned was also tall but it's only that) but what few things we see in both POVs suggests Karstarks are closer to Kings of Winter in appearance than the Current Starks are.

 

It is also entirely possible that if the story of Brandon the Daughterless had any truth to it, whether it was Bael who fathered his grandson or some other, Starks now carry prominent features from both sides. Edric Storm is one such example in the story.

 

Some more genetics information,

While a son, having gonosomes XY takes his Y from father and his only X from his mother, a daughter, having gonosomes XX takes one X from the father and one from the mother. Only one of these Xs are used though, the other one is "silenced", which is called lyonization.

 

In light of this and the earlier information, assuming "line" defining features are passed on through gonosomes only for simplification (taking autosomes into account would complicate things even more) Starks would now lack their line defining Y because of a broken male line but if lucky they may still be able to retain their line defining Xs from Brandon's Daughter Karstarks, however, may have an unbroken line and this is why their men look like the Kings of Winter from the few descriptions we get on them both.They may also retain the line definng Xs.

Line defining Xs would only be passed on to daughters but there is also a solution for that; cousin marriages aren't uncommon in Westeros (Rickard Stark, Tywin Lannister, Wyman Manderly proposing for Donella). A lord marrying a cousin every few generations may bring back the line defining X back into the family with some "luck".

For Starks and Karstarks this could be;

-Lyanna, and Arya looking like eachother would be from the X Lyanna share with Eddard

- Jon, Eddard, Benjen looking alike assuming R+L = J, Eddard and Benjen shares an X through their mother and Lyanna passed the same X  she had from her mother to Jon. Eddard and Benjen also shares a Y but is irrelevalnt for looking like Jon who got his Y from Rhaegar.

- Jon and Arya looking alike would be from the X Lyanna shared with Arya being passed to Jon.

- Karstark men and Kings of Winter  looking alike would be unbroken line of Y

- Arya and Alys looking alike would be the relevant X being reintroduced into both lines, Arya's would be Rickard cousin marriage and Alys' could be from her mother or his father's mother.

 

This is of course a simplification with gonads only, bringing autosomes also into play would change it greatly.

Going simply for gonosomes also mean that Stark and Karstark female looking alike could mean nothing of Stark defining X but a more recent introduction of another X to both lines.

 

Bringing autosomes also into play, the family defining features could just be selfish DNA, having more chance to be passed on than their allelles.

 

I'm studying medicine so while I know some genetics obviously someone who is studying genetics would have more knowledge than me and I'd be happy to learn more if anyone here with more knowledge than me is willing to share theirs.

 

One tinfoily idea: Considering how there's magic in the series, selfish genes of the series may not just be acting selfish during reproductional activities but they may also be something like midichlorians from star wars and also have effects outside the body they are in. This could be how appearances are preserved; carriers of the contender genes are eliminated so those with the proper copies continue to rule. Robb dying and Bran becoming a cripple, leaving only baby Rickon behind in an out of reach place would be an example. With the three brothers removed from the succession, whether they are still alive or not, Jon now has a higher place in succession then he currently did, in fact he's at the top if Robb has legitimized him and Stannis also wanted to place him on Winterfell. With a R+L revelation, he can go all Rickard-Arya on Sansa to merge the lines.

Another possible example could be from the Reach: Tyrells placing a distant Garth cousin when Manderly and Peake fought to place their wives on the throne. Selfish genes acted their subtle magic and wives, presumably with children carrying their father's genes  were prevented from gaining the throne.

Another one from the Reach Tyrells were an Andal family at sometime in history a Tyrell married a Gardener princess. All the Tyrells we know currently have Brown hair, which we usually see with first men, this Gardener could be where they got the Brown hair. If it is so then Aegon giving the Reach to Tyrells instead of some other family like Hightowers who haven't raised an army against them could be the selfish genes placing themselves as the rulers of the Reach

Don't forget the Starks habit of marrying their cousins . 

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