Nomad

The night before last we watched on television an actor discovering the origin of his nomadic spirit in the grandfather who deserted his grandmother within days of his mother's birth. This maternal grandfather was a member of a well-known family of travelling showmen. I suspected that spirits ran in families. This programme lent support to the idea.

I haven't heard that spirits, like the hunting instinct or the one to protect territory, have been located in the human genome Perhaps there is a parallel form of inheritance which allows them to be passed down through generations, not only in humans but in other animals.

In our part of the world where land is considered the property of individuals and large mammals are constrained within human territories, any nomadic instinct our four-footed associates might have is well and truly crushed. It's different in parts of Africa through which wildebeest and elephants can freely migrate.

Instincts may, or may not, be passed on through the DNA, but it is interesting to use the gene metaphor and think of territorial and nomadic instincts as alleles. The territorial instinct is the dominant allele (at least in the developed world.) The recessive nomadic allele is most likely to survive when copies are inherited from both parents.

There is another possibility. Instincts, as fire spirits, when frustrated by conditions in the material world, can shape-shift into other forms. The travelling showman can become a wandering dervish.