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Through induction, you can also say that your sibling is your nilth (0th) cousin, and your identical twin is your negative-first cousin. That makes aunt or uncle a nilth cousin once removed, and a great aunt or great uncle a nilth cousin twice removed. Your parents are negative-first cousins once removed.

If this sounds ridiculous, that's because it is, as a natural consequence of the ridiculous nomenclature.

It would be far less confusing to just insert an unordered pair of numbers for both individuals' genetic distance from their common ancestor. So instead of a first cousin once removed, you would have a (2,3)-cousin. Identical twins would be (0,0), parents would be (0,1), ordinary siblings (1,1), aunts and uncles (1,2), and so on. A fourth cousin would be (5,5).

But that doesn't account for half-siblings, so it would be inadequate for some family relationships.



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