Tiene la sonrisa de su madre

Celebrated columnist and science writer Carl Zimmer presents a deeply original perspective on what we pass down from generation to generation. Darwin played a crucial role in turning heredity into a scientific question, but he failed to answer it. The birth of genetics, at the beginning of the 20th century, seemed to do it. Little by little, the old notions of heredity were being translated into a language of genes. As the technology for studying genes became cheaper, millions of people requested genetic tests to link themselves to missing parents, distant ancestors or ethnic identities. But heredity is not limited to genes passed from parent to child, but continues within our own body. We say that we inherit genes from our ancestors, but we inherit other things that matter just as much or more, from microbes to technologies to make life more comfortable.