Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

GENEALOGY

Speaking in strictly biological terms, and ignoring the matter of adoption, we all have two parents. Therefore we all have four grandparents. Therefore we all have  eight great-grandparents. Therefore we all have sixteen great-great-grandparents. Therefore we all have thirty-two great-great-great grandparents. Therefore we all have sixty-four great-great-great-great-grandparents. Assuming each generation to be between 25 and 30 years, this takes us back only somewhere between 150 and 200 years. Take our ancestry back 500 or 1000 or 10,000 years, and we all have thousands and ultimately millions of forebears.

Considering this fact should be a good tonic against biological racism. Ultimately, we are all connected in one human race. In some way, the body of each of us is the product of the whole of human history, despite all the ways, over thousands of years, that different ethnicities have developed, at least partly as the result of long-term adaptation of peoples to different climates. All of us have ancestors in common with Asians, Africans, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, Europeans, Semitic Peoples and Pacific Peoples.

Considering the genetic inheritance of each of us, dominant or recessive genes will determine if we do or do not have a certain colour of skin and eyes, a certain colour and type of hair, a certain size and shape of body and perhaps a certain level of intelligence. Matters of temperament (are you mainly melancholic, choleric, sanguine or phlegmatic etc.?) seem to be as much a matter of environment, upbringing and social influences as of biology. Yet the specific genetic inheritance of each of us will be unique. Allowing for the rare phenomenon of the “genetic throwback”, siblings will probably have a family likeness. But even as the offspring of the same parents, they will not be identical – and even identical twins have their physical differences. Having exactly the same forebears does not mean being exactly the same sort of person. None of us is produced by a cookie-cutter.

As well as warning us against racism, all these considerations should be a good vaccine against any neurosis concerning what we have genetically inherited. To discover that one or two of our ancestors had severe defects in character or behaviour, or even mental competence, does not mean that any of us is predestined to have the same traits. Biologically, we do not inherit exactly the same characteristics as one or two of our forebears. Can madness run through a family? Possibly – but it does not mean that all members of the family will be mad.

Why am I delivering this dead obvious and platitudinous sermon?

Because not too long ago, I read a book in which a woman worried about two of her biological forebears who, she discovered, had severe character defects and medical problems. She feared that she might have inherited some of their mental and physical weaknesses. Yet in the end, she came to undertand that what she was, was as much the product of her – very good – upbringing and environment as of her genetic inheritance. And besides, the two (deceased) forebears who worried her were only a small part of the genetic jigsaw that she herself was.

I write all this to refute the pseudo-science of eugenics, which is making a comeback in new guises. Eugenics would mechanically damn and/or destroy human beings for their supposed inherited defects, in the absurd quest for only “perfect” offspring. Often eugenics has been, and still is, allied to hard biological racism. And it is ultimately nonsense. The existence of each of us is not the result of the sort of hard determinism that eugenics always presupposes. We are each unique. And we are all part of the human family.