I’m talking about people who flaunt their genealogy going back hundreds of years, and think it makes them ‘special’.
It’s only as special as the culture that has been passed down to them. That is real.
There’s another thing that we inherit, and that’s personality traits. I was raised at a time when U of Chicago was pushing the nurture, not nature. They wanted traits to be defined by environment so that they could plan how to modify people’s personalities. So a lot of the research into nature affecting people went down the tube.
I was raised by a family that was risk adverse. I scared them to dickens and always wondered how this cuckoo ended up in that nest. Once I got into genealogy, I kept finding ancestors with whom I shared far more personality traits than the gentle and wonderful immediate family that raised me.
So I’m a big believer that some genes do survive the winnowing out of the vast numbers of our ancestors to affect who we are today.