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Counterpoint: Ancestry

[Originally posted to Themestream on 2001-04-01.]

In the third of my "Counterpoint" articles, where I offer alternative views on many issues (translation: indulge in the game of Sacred Cow Tipping), I would like to explore the issue of ancestry.

Ancestry is viewed as extremely important to many people. Many people think it should and even that it inevitably does play a role in one's religion (or spirituality or faith or whatever term you prefer). Many followers of Asatru are quite adamant on this point. Of course, "practicing the faith of my people" or "following in the spiritual footsteps of ones ancestors" are common reasons many pagans, not just Asatru, give for why they follow pre-Christian religious paths. I myself have commented in the past that I prefer the "native European religions of my ancestors" over imports from the Middle-East. But who exactly would my ancestors be?

As a philosopher, my first instinct when analyzing anything is to nail down the definitions, so we know exactly what we're talking about. So before proceeding any further, we need to figure out what exactly ancestry is, and what it means for someone to be your ancestor.

At this point, you probably think I'm a little daft. Everyone knows what an ancestor is, and what ancestry means, right?

I have my doubts.

I think most people, when they talk about ancestry and kinship and the like, tend to link these concepts with heredity and genetics. They point both to the past with its emphasis on familial relations and to modern scientific knowledge of genes. We inherit a great deal from our parents, thanks to that miraculous molecule, DNA.

Some people even take this link further, as I found out recently after stumbling across a few articles on metagenetics, which transcends the boundaries of current science to touch on metaphysics, religion, and Jungian psychology. All this to prove "ancestry matters".

All very interesting. All very entertaining. And all rather pointless. Time for a history lesson:

A long time ago, on a planet very near to you now, Gaia decided genetics wasn't a terribly good method for species to use in order to adapt to their environment and to pass on their adaptations to the next generation. Sure, it was a method that she'd been using for billions of years successfully, but she'd come up with a new one, one she thought would work much better, and she was right.

Today, we call animals that operate under the new model "mammals". Now, there are many traits that distinguish mammals from other animals, but there's only one that's relevant to this discussion: mammals have a different brain structure than the reptiles they evolved from, to accommodate Gaia's new model. They have a large extension to their brains that is not terribly task specific but quite adaptable. This is important because it is required to implement the new model of adaptation and heredity. For Gaia's new model was for genetics and instinct to take a back seat to upbringing and learning.

The problem with the genetic model was that it's too slow. A species as a whole can advance by having old genes die off and new ones introduced, but individuals were pretty much stuck with what they got, and either died or didn't. Adaptation wasn't something that could occur in an individual to any significant degree. Adaptation as a process required millions of years.

The new model changes that. Under the new model, adaptation can occur within an individual lifetime. But if these adaptations are not genetically encoded, how are they passed on? By learning, of course. One person adapts, that person tells his family, his friends, his tribe, and before long, everyone who needs the adaptation gets it. An entire species can be transformed in a matter of a few years or even less, rather than over tens of millions.

Once this adaptation was firmly established, genetics lost its hereditary primacy. We do indeed inherit from others, but very little of importance is inherited genetically. We are not reptiles or insects. To truly understand heredity in our species, one must turn to memetics, and only through memetics can any meaningful concept of ancestry and kinship be understood.

Memetics, for those who aren't familiar with the term, refers to the study of the propagation of memes. A meme is like a gene; it's a carrier of a bit of information. Genes are carried on chromosomes, memes are carried within ideologies (or paradigms or belief-systems or whatever term you prefer). Memetic evolution has a lot in common with genetic evolution, except of course it tends to happen at a much faster pace. But what does that have to do with the question at hand?

Quite simply put, as humans rather than insects, it seems rather silly for us to define ancestry in terms of genetics when nature has designed us to work memetically. Genetics is not entirely unimportant, but it plays a secondary role to memetics for us. Thus, it seems hardly relevant that my genetic ancestry is northern European when my memetic ancestry is decidedly Greek. While my genetic ancestors were worshipping Thor, my memetic ancestors were worshipping Athena. While my genetic ancestors were worrying about what is honor and virtue for a Germanic man living in the wilds of northern Europe, my memetic ancestors were worrying about what is honor and virtue for a city-dweller like me.

We inherit many things in life, in many different ways, not just through genetics. From my genetic ancestors, I inherited many things, such as my tendency to painfully sunburn in a ludicrously short amount of time. But how important is this compared to the debt I owe my memetic ancestors like Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato?

Genetics only defines who you are if you're an insect. Genetics only plays a significant role in who you are if you're a reptile. I'm a human being, and I know who my ancestors are. I do honor them, and I follow in their intellectual and spiritual footsteps. If you really believe ancestry matters, be sure you're honoring your true ancestors, and don't let anyone fool you into thinking this has anything at all to do with parentage, "blood", or genetics.