Trees are Family: DNA, Ancestors and Whakapapa

Trees are Family: DNA, ancestors, whakapapa (fa-ka-pa-pa)

In my first article, I emphasised the notion that all things are interconnected, referring to this as a gift from Indigenous to the West. I wove Indigenous knowledge and Western science into a single tapestry where nature met science. That article told a story ranging from the Big Bang and collapsing stars, through to humans via water. I outlined the Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen chain reaction and noted that these three chemicals are found in the backbone of our DNA.

What are DNA and whakapapa?

We often think of DNA as a marker of our individuality, a kind of perfect description of who we are at a very basic and biological level. We trace our DNA through our ancestors in a sequence of generations, deriving great meaning. In Māori terms, whakapapa, which refers to heritage, ancestors, and detailed ancestry (storage of 140 generations in oral traditions was reported by Colonialists, for example) also refers to multiple species. The stories of an iwi (tribe) hold references to ‘objects’ such as canoes, and species such as whales and birds. It is widely understood that humans whakapapa to the stars. In my whakapapa, I have the HMAV Bounty, which while being an object, also has been mapped through multiple generations, and were it not for that ship in 1789, I actually would not be here writing this. So the energy of its voyage has played out through the eight generations since, in many ways, from the presence of cousins on Hitiaurevareva today, to Bounty events on Norfolk Island, and to my journey to the distant island. Hitiaurevareva means ‘the island far, far away.’

DNA and Species

This talk of heritage and DNA also brings us to an interesting point. Utilizing mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), there is a ‘mitochondrial Eve’ who lived in Africa 150,000-200,000 years ago, established in a paper for Nature in 1987. That’s 600,000 generations. Are you feeling a little older now? Other women were alive at that time, but this Eve’s mtDNA lineage is the only one that survived unbroken to the present. mtDNA is based entirely on female heritage–while both daughters and sons receive it, only daughters can pass it along. The distant DNA record is the story of your mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother et al.

It might be interesting to ask well, if Indigenous say we are connected to species, what does science have to say? If you ask yourself or your friend what is DNA, there are two fundamental mechanisms at play: expression and replication. As Alberts and colleagues pointed out, in gene expression, DNA determines the order of amino acids in proteins, via transcription (DNA → RNA) and translation (RNA → protein). Basically, DNA is a prescriptive map of how all the bits of your body come to be structurally – the way your lungs will unfold over time, as you grow from being a baby, which then becomes subject to environmental factors such as what you put into your mouth. DNA, then, is an executable code that also makes a copy of the executable code. Measuring mutations in the copy is how assessments of age are attained.

As pointed out in the journal Nature, humans and chimpanzees share 96% of DNA, suggesting a common ancestor 6–7 million years ago. If you ever wondered why it is science uses mice in experiments, that is because, according to the US National Human Genome Research Institute, 85–90% of human and mouse DNA is shared in terms of gene sequences and functional elements. What this means is that a mouse basically has the same liver, heart, and lungs as yours, they’re just smaller.

If we peer inside your body, around 15% is branching structures - brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, spleen, pancreas, intestines, stomach, bladder, and reproductive organs, so how you breathe, think and exist biologically. The precise ways these organs develop in time is dictated by your DNA and environmental factors.

This applies to all living things. Trees and humans actually share DNA, in terms of gene expression. That 15% of branching structures in the body are direct correlates to branching structures in trees. If we include the organ of the skin, which is host to the branching structures of blood vessels and nerve capillaries, then the percentage shared jumps to 25-30%. And the interconnections don’t stop there.

DNA and Gender

Hidden within the structure of DNA, are multiple secrets that provide clues for living and ethics. For example, the DNA difference between women and men is approximately one-tenth of one per cent – 0.1%, as Jorde & Wooding write. This is remarkable given how much of Western society is gender split. Science simply does not support an inequality of gender.

If we look around to other countries, we find instances where the emphasis on gender difference is not supported. For example, in some Buddhist monasteries, all disciples have their head shaved and wear identical clothing. This is because humans have this tendency to force illusions onto reality (it is after all, how we manufacture the future). It is considered not possible that an egoless state is somehow related to gender, and attaining an egoless state is essential to achieve enlightenment. This is what Rita Gross had to say:

Clinging to gender identity and letting conventional ideas about gender dictate one’s life thus contradicts all central Buddhist teachings. One would then also have to contend that egolessness is gendered, which would be a self-contradictory, illogical proposition.

On Hawai’i and Tahiti, there is a third gender known as Māhū, who are people who contain and express both feminine and masculine properties (the macrons on the vowels indicate a long sound). Traditionally, Māhū are highly regarded a teachers and nurturers, and there are legends on Hawai’i of Māhū who were healers. As we have just seen above, in Buddhist beliefs, a unity of masculine and feminine is viewed as a higher state of being. In the West, there’s a bit of work to do on beliefs around gender. The genders share quite a bit more (99.9% of DNA) than what separates us, according to science.

So where do we get to from all this?

I’m hoping you might now have a sense of DNA jauntily tracing spacetime tangentially, bringing us closer to who we are: an interconnected species, and part of the family of all living things.

The West also might need to rethink gender and the position of women in society. And the fact we are related to all humans, chimpanzees, mice and trees through varying percentages of DNA, changes things. One other thing to hold on to, is the process of looking at what other cultures say, which I described in my PhD as an aspect of the People Dimension of knowledge. I’ll introduce you to thinking of Knowledge as Dimensional in the next article.

References
Alberts, B., Johnson, A., Lewis, J., Raff, M., Roberts, K., & Walter, P. (2015). Molecular biology of the cell (6th ed.). Garland Science. 

Cann, R., Stoneking, M. & Wilson, A. Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution. Nature 325, 31–36 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1038/325031a0

Gross, R. M. (n.d.). Go beyond gender: Buddhism beyond gender. Shambhala Publications. Retrieved July 31, 2025, from https://www.shambhala.com/go-beyond-gender-excerpt-buddhism-beyond-gender

Jorde, L. B., & Wooding, S. P. (2004). Genetic variation, classification and 'race'. Nature Genetics, 36(11 Suppl), S28–S33. https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1435

National Human Genome Research Institute. (2010). Why Mouse Matters. https://www.genome.gov/10001345/importance-of-mouse-genome

Patterson, N., Richter, D. J., Gnerre, S., Lander, E. S., & Reich, D. (2006). Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees. Nature, 441(7097), 1103–1108. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04789