In times past, lineage and kinship were vital to heritage, if not synonymous with it. As shown in Chapters 2 and 3, power, property, prestige, and identity itself derived from forebears and were sustained by family. Today inheritance comes less freighted with either privilege or obligation, and lineage becomes a faint, even unseemly, echo.

Yet in other ways biological ties have more profound import than ever. Bloodlines are valued for a host of virtues, including fixed personality traits, adhesion to tradition, and unswerving fealty. Millions seek family roots; nations and minorities trumpet ancestral ties. To be a Breton, a Hawaiian, a Cherokee, a Maori, an Amish, or a Hutterite means first and foremost to be born of such stock. One does not inherit Basqueness simply by wanting to; it comes with birth. The stress on descent is reminiscent of dynastic Europe. This chapter shows how and why determinism is rife and discusses its fearsome consequences.

Popular notions of nation and race, purity and mixing mirror determinisms based on blood and genes. Despite lip service to free will and cultural change, what we inherit is increasingly felt to be imparted at birth, innate and immutable. Pseudoscientific fatalism promotes the resurgence of racism and eugenic bias. Stress on biological causation finds ready allies among heritage champions, fostering partisan chauvinism and passive compliance with the status quo. Few know or want to know that, far from being innate and fixed, heritage is ever devised and reshaped by new needs.

The next section below shows how traditional concern with elite descent diffused to entire peoples.