Carl Zimmer

There's genes, there are other kinds of molecules, there's culture, there are all sorts of things that

go into making this connection between the past and the present.

But if you want to really prove that you have your mother's laugh, science isn't quite ready to help you out just yet.

Well, culture is really kind of like a separate channel of heredity that we humans have.

I mean, we humans are really extraordinary that we really have a completely different channel of heredity that other species don't have.

So, you know, we can give information, knowledge, customs to our children, to future generations.

through language and through learning and so on.

I mean, we're the only species where there's really good evidence of teaching.

That's really remarkable because what that means is that it's not like every generation has to just relearn how to crack open a nut with a rock.

You can teach children how to do it.

And then when they grow up, they could get better at it and they can teach their kids that as well.

And so you have this

heredity of culture that's traveling down.

It's been traveling down our species probably for hundreds of thousands of years, and it's a real secret to our success as a species.

Well, one reason the book is so thick is because heredity has this long, deep, powerful history.

Heredity means a lot to us.

And so part of what I'm doing in the book is trying to explore why it means so much to us, and also what kind of trouble we can get ourselves into by searching for that value.

There's some very dangerous aspects to our obsession with heredity.

You can look to the early 1900s in the United States.

When genetics emerged, there were a number of very powerful voices who said, aha, we understand heredity completely.