Close-up of my great-great-great-great grandmother: The world's abundant creationist theories include the ancient belief of the Bushongo people, from the Congo basin, that top-God Bumba vomited the sun, the moon, the earth, plants and animals and thereafter humanity. Bumba notwithstanding, geneticists maintain that an organism's physiological characteristics are determined by information inherited from parents whose DNA is, in turn, passed on to them by theirs and so forth. This process probably goes back to the unicellular organisms that dwelled in the lukewarm squelchiness that was the dawn of life.

Although people's behavioural and social characteristics are very much the result of environmental influences, it is nevertheless interesting to consider that the basis for a person's genetic information originated millions of years ago and that we are carriers of that inherited data.

Furthermore, an individual's genetic information could well have been inherited from peasants, priests, prostitutes, punters, poets, people with squeaky voices, ne'er-do-wells, rascals, scallywags, extortionists, blackmailers, murderers, murderesses, murderees, rapists, victims, jailers, prisoners, misers, philanthropists, beggars, doctors, soldiers, pacifists, reactionaries, revolutionaries, law-abiders, encyclopaedia salespeople, shelf makers, shoemakers, shoewearers, barefoot Carmelites, atheists, God-fearers, dog fearers, Doberman owners, fussers, slow- and sharp-witted Sunday drivers, taxi drivers, taxidermists, tax inspectors, tax evaders, people who can blow bubbles with their saliva and an endless list of people with other characteristics.