You probably could if you interpret that sentence very creatively. But I think it's useful to remember that this is mathematics, and words like "control", "desc

You probably could if you interpret that sentence very creatively. But I think it's useful to remember that this is mathematics, and words like "control", "descendant" and "ancestor" have specific technical meanings (all defined in the article, I believe). The technical meaning of that sentence has to do with probability theory (probability distributions, correlation, conditionals), and not so much calculus (differentiable functions, limits, continuity).