Genetics

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Genetics is the study of heredity and the variation of inherited traits, its method the analysis of genetic material to trace how variation passes between generations and among populations. The field received its name in 1905, when William Bateson coined the term genetics to describe the new science built on Gregor Mendel's rediscovered laws of inheritance, giving the study of heredity a name and a formal footing distinct from older theories of descent.

For an atlas of religion and belief, genetics underlies the use, elsewhere in this collection, of ancestry and population evidence to test a tradition's own account of its origins. A community's claimed descent from a founding ancestor, a migration story or a lineage of priestly succession makes a claim about shared inheritance that population genetics can independently support or complicate, working from the genetic record itself rather than from the tradition's own telling.

That independence is why the field matters here specifically. Where a tradition's identity rests partly on a claim of shared ancestry, genetics is the discipline able to say what the inherited genetic record actually shows, agreeing with the traditional account in some cases and complicating it in others.