Quotes About Ancestry

What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor? Augustine

superstitions and other non-factual beliefs will locally evolve – change over generations – either by random drift or by some sort of analogue of Darwinian selection, eventually showing a pattern of significant divergence from common ancestry.

if Jesus really was born of a virgin, Joseph's ancestry is irrelevant and cannot be used to fulfil, on Jesus' behalf, the Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah should be descended from David.

The sin of Adam and Eve is thought to be have passed down the male line - transmitted in the semen according to Augustine. What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor?

A branch of one of the cranial nerves, the recurrent laryngeal runs from the brain to the larynx. It doesn't go straight there, however. Instead, it dives down into the chest, loops around one of the main arteries leaving the heart, and proceeds back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe the detour is significant (British understatement) and it is presumably costly. The explanation lies in history, in the nerve's emergence in our fish ancestors before a discernible neck evolved.

By tracing paternal ancestry through Y-DNA, geneticists have found that a third of African American men today are directly descended from a white male ancestor who fathered a mulatto child in the slavery era, "most probably from rape or coerced sexuality," in the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of African American studies at Harvard, and presenter of popular television shows on black genealogy.

Tell me, do you get the ape in you from your mother's or your father's side of the family? - Cat

she's related to one of the barons. With all

There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them. — ECCLESIASTICUS 44:8–9 Barn

Your kind have forgotten the old ways," says Eirne. "You have forgotten the importance of the tales, the wisdom of the past, the strength that rises from tree and stone and stream, the bond between one world and the other.

History is precious; ritual is precious. Lose that and we lose the knowledge of our own being, Lose the thread of ancestry, lose the tales, and we are adrift without identity.

My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.

So all we know about Hugh MacLean is that his financial situation is unclear, he has an unknown number of illegitimate children, and the family curse is true. I've caught quiet a prize!

Where you fro, miss?

What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now?

you cannot fight a man's history.

Yet my great-grandfather was but a water-man, looking one way and rowing another: and I got most of my estate by the same occupation.

If you want to civilize a man, begin with his grandmother.

If you would civilize a man, begin with his grandmother.

There is no more reason to believe that man descended from an inferior animal than there is to believe that a stately mansion has descended from a small cottage.

Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible.

The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.

If Adam had had a real hairy back, we probably wouldn't be here today.

Man will return to his origins. Goethe has finally become as squiggly as the city of his fathers.