Paternity
In the olden days paternity and the male line were a big deal. Which is silly, because when a chick gives birth, you can only really be sure of exactly one parent. Especially in the olden days, those tarts. But thinking about genetics, as one does, I realised that the paternal line has the only sequence that actually does continue unbroken from generation to generation: the Y chromosome. All men get theirs from their father, and pass it to their sons. X chromosomes flit around all over the shop, and statistically it’s theoretically possible (unlikely yes, but not *impossible*) for a grandchild to share no genetic material with one or two of their grandparents — unless it’s a boy and his father’s father.
So the paternal line actually *is* significant. Except that, continuing the thought to its logical conclusion, we’re all human, and we all share most of our genetic whatsername; so its stands to reason that, at one point, we probably all came from a single father — so all our Y chromosomes are probably the same anyway. Yes, I share my father’s father’s father’s etc. Y chromosome, but so does every other boy on the planet. Oh well.
