How does the author present the theme of nature versus nurture in the memoir, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love?

While much of the book focuses on paternity and what Dani has inherited from Ben Walden (nature) and what she has inherited from Paul Shapiro (nurture), she also writes about inheritance in relation to her mother, with whom she is biologically related. She writes: "Biology doesn’t promise similarity. Traits skip generations. Characteristics emerge, seemingly out of nowhere. Our parents seem alien to us. My mother, certainly, had always seemed alien to me, biology be damned" (176). As Dani never felt an inherited connection to her mother, she always identified more with her father and felt that she was more her father's child than her mother's. This shows that inheritance isn't always completely related to biology or genetics, but sometimes a more ephemeral kind of inheritance can be passed down to us by a parent regardless of whether or not they are genetically related to us. On the flip side, the vast similarities between Dani and Ben Walden show how many traits, both physical and not, can be genetically inherited. In this way, inheritance is presented as a complicated and somewhat mysterious concept which has new hard and fast rules. Dani has little in common with her biological mother but relates to both her fathers, both biological and not, in different ways. Inheritance therefore, is not prescriptive. Instead, it is more of an open-ended question. As Dani asks: "What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?" (27).