Completely irrelevant to the Eliot topic, and only tangentially relevant to the other tangents here, but some might find this interesting:
"At conception, half the mother's DNA and half the father's go into each of the child's 23 chromosome pairs. But there's no telling how much of it will make the more or less random cut when their grandchildren are conceived, or in any of the subdivisions after that. In theory, you may possess no genetic connection whatsoever to your own great-great-great-grandfather."
--Richard Conniff, "The Family Tree, Pruned: Its lure is powerful--but genealogy is meaningless, relatively" (Smithsonian, July 2007, pp. 90-97)
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