People’s fascination with genealogy is nothing new, but modern biology has seemingly made possible an exact breakdown of the DNA of our ancestors. Apart from the questionable precision of some of these ancestry reports, what this cultural phenomenon reveals is a deep thirst to be able to tell a story about ourselves. But that story is almost inevitably a selective narrative of our past rather than an accurate representation of our biological history, writes Eviatar Zerubavel.

Why do we consider Barack Obama a black man with a white mother rather than a white man with a black father? What are the implications of knowing, as we now do, that chimpanzees are genetically closer to humans than they are to gorillas? Why did the Nazis believe that unions between Germans and Jews would produce Jews rather than Germans? Are sixth cousins still family?

In order to even address, let alone answer, such questions, we must first examine our unmistakably social visions of genealogical relatedness. What we need, in other words, is a sociological understanding of ancestry and descent.

As evident from the wide popularity of the television series "Who Do You Think You Are?" and the dozens of websites and software programs designed to help people construct their family trees and discover hitherto unknown ancestors and relatives, we certainly have a tremendous fascination with genealogy. Every day, thousands of "root seekers" comb libraries, cemeteries, and the internet in an effort to quench their seemingly insatiable "thirst for tracing lineages."

___

Despite the modern meritocratic rise of the self-made individual, who we are still depends at least partly on whom we descend from.

___