Nobody teaches a baby to walk.
Did your parents sit you down and explain how muscles work, how balance is maintained, how to shift weight from one foot to the other? No. You just started trying. Falling. Trying again.
Same with language. Yes, we learn the words from the people around us. But the ability to learn a language - the hunger for it, the capacity to absorb grammar without ever being taught grammar - that was already in you when you arrived.
We were not blank slates. Tabula rasa was a nice theory. It was wrong.
We are born with the infrastructure for language. For love. For belonging. For recognising family. Nobody teaches a child what a mother is. They already know.
A child inherits traits from both parents - but not randomly. Random variation only happens where the parents differ. Where they agree, the trait passes through unchanged. Nature seems to know the difference between what is negotiable and what is not.
And here is something that surprised me when I first learned it: we also pass on something of what we lived through.
Our experiences leave faint molecular traces on our DNA. Not the events themselves - but something like their imprint. A signature of what we faced. This is what epigenetics is about. Your parents passed on not just what they were born with, but something of what their lives wrote on them before you were born.
Which means you carry more history than you realise.
Your learning since childhood. Your parents’ learning. Their parents’. Their parents’ parents’. All the way back, without interruption, for thousands of generations.
You have, in some sense, lived billions of lives.
Now let me show you something with arithmetic.
You have 2 parents. 4 grandparents. 8 great-grandparents.
Each generation, the number doubles.
Go back 100 generations - roughly 2,500 years, to around the time of Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha - and the number of ancestors you theoretically have is:
\[2^{100}\]That is about a 1 followed by 30 zeros.
The total number of humans who have ever lived on Earth is estimated at around 100 billion - a 1 followed by 11 zeros.
So your theoretical ancestor count, just 2,500 years back, is a billion billion times larger than all the humans who have ever existed.
Which means only one thing is possible: the same people appear over and over again in everyone’s family tree. The branches loop back. They cross. They merge. What looks like separate lineages is actually the same small pool of people, shared by all of us.
The family tree is not a tree that keeps spreading outward. It folds back in on itself.
What this means is simple, though it takes a moment to land.
Everyone alive today shares common ancestors - not from some prehistoric mist millions of years ago, but from a few thousand years back. People whose names we might actually know. People who walked cities we have heard of.
We are not distantly related. We are closely related. The distance is mostly in our heads.
I think somewhere inside us, we sense this already. Watch what happens when a stranger’s baby smiles at you. Something moves. You did not choose it. It just happens.
Maybe that is not sentiment. Maybe that is recognition.
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