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.
I think this is true. I recognize a lot of loves and interests in myself that I can see also in my father, grandparents, etc.