Week 3 After Blog – Is Heredity Only Biological?

I thought I will try to get a grasp on the topic of human variation and hence whether heredity is only biological or not. I tend to think that heredity is simply biological, especially considering the immense work and development in scientific analysis of genes and how people relate. I would think that my entire gene pool is made up of the gene pools from my past and based on the immediate family I was born in to. Most parallels of heredity we hear nowadays have mostly to do with traits that are passed on from one generation to the other. However, by thinking more closely about it, I came to the conclusion that heredity includes much more than only biological aspects. I was looking for a definition for heredity and I found this one. According to Merriam Webster heredity is “the sum of the characteristics and potentialities genetically derived from one's ancestors.” Now that makes sense, according to my own thinking. However, but then it also says “tradition” and general “inheritance”. In my mind, this could mean a lot of things.

So taking a step back, it makes sense to think about heredity in a different way. And I asked myself the question of what kind of heredity is considered to be “biological”? What about the cultural aspects and how plays contemporary social and political aspects into the equation. In a basic way, mankind is not only existing in the way they live based on their genetically makeup, but also by believes, culture, value systems and social environment. That all together is passed on to next generations. Thus, it can’t only be biological.

An example is depression. Many scientists say that depression is a genetically disorder. However, I don’t think that is true. I believe that people with depression, even though some more prone to it than others, are also inherently influenced by their contemporary environment and their historical culture and the way they grew up. I reject the idea that just because my grandmother was sick, means I am more prone to be sick with the same illness.

In that same way, I doubt that a y-generation has the same issues than the baby boomers. There are different environments, cultures, social aspects and political circumstance we grow up in and hence this is a constant change. In fact, I would argue that the biological part of heredity is a fixed variable, versus all other aspects depending on the time, environment and circumstances are flexible and hence ever changing and impacting the fixed biological aspect.