1912: The Generous Ghosts of the Gene Pool: On Secret Santas, Ancestral Strangers, and Gifts We Cannot Return
By E. Percival Druksel, M.A. (Oxon.), F.R.S., Fellow of Ducksin College
The practice of giving things anonymously to people who neither requested them nor can send them back is, in my professional view, the central organising principle of the universe. In the faculty room we call it “tradition”; in the parish they call it “grace”; and in genetics, apparently, it has become a line item in the budget of Fate.
Let us begin with the more manageable horror: Christmas.
In certain circles, now rapidly becoming all circles, there has arisen a custom known as the “secret Santa.” The premise is simple. A number of otherwise sane adults agree to place their names in a receptacle, remove one another’s identities at random, and then exchange objects under the strict condition that nobody knows quite who has done what to whom. This is said to foster community, although one might argue that it mostly fosters stationery sales and lingering suspicion.
The mechanics matter. Someone—in every office there is such a someone, a minor deity of the card index—possesses the complete list. They alone know that Miss Elkins is responsible for the lemon‑yellow scarf that will haunt Mr. Peabody’s winters, and that the cheap cigar case presented to the Dean rose from the nervous imagination of a junior lecturer in philology who will never be promoted now.
This central organiser is indispensable. Without them, the system dissolves into chaos and open warfare (“Who gave me this?” “Why?” “What have I done to you?”). With them, we obtain a degree of order and an illusion of pure generosity. As Dr. Horace Leverton writes in his tragically earnest tract On Seasonal Exchanges and the Modern Soul (London, 1907), “The anonymous gift is the soul’s rehearsal for Judgement Day: everybody knows what they have done, nobody knows who will react.”
The giver wraps. The giver leaves. The recipient blinks at the object and tries to construct a personality from the paper. The whole exercise rests on a delicate agreement not to claim credit and not to return anything, no matter how vividly it clashes with the wallpaper.
Now, if we move from the staff room to the genealogical strata, we discover that Nature has been running the same game for considerably longer, without even the dignity of sherry.
Modern discussions of heredity are full of what are discreetly termed “unrecorded contributions.” That is to say, a number of ancestral populations seem to have added their particular oddments to our constitution and then inconveniently disappeared. One respected savant, Professor Wilberforce Hinks, summarised the matter in his Outline of Hereditary Curiosities (Cambridge, 1909): “There are in us more ancestors than there are in the archives, which is very unfair to the archives.” He meant it as a complaint; it reads, now, as an understatement.
We possess, for instance, certain traits for which no tidy ancestral label can be affixed. There are traces of long‑vanished cousins in the blood, bones, and tempers of our species—cousins who do not appear in the respectable family tree and who, like that one uncle everyone refuses to discuss, are known only from their lingering effects. These are the ghost contributors: populations who gave, intermarried, shuffled away, and took their story with them.
The resemblance to office festivity is not accidental; it is structural. In both cases we are dealing with anonymous contribution to a recipient who did not ask and cannot return it.
In the seasonal version, the thing is literal. You receive a pair of socks knitted in a colour that ought not to exist outside theology. You did not request them; your feet were minding their own business. Nevertheless, you are now in possession, and social custom—that stern aunt of civilisation—forbids any attempt at restitution. The socks remain. So, unfortunately, does the knitter.
In the hereditary version, the position is more thorough. You receive, without being consulted, a selection of peculiarities: an inherited susceptibility, perhaps, or a predisposition to see faces in the wallpaper, or a nose that seems to have mistaken you for someone taller. You cannot send them back, not even with a polite note. The givers are tens of thousands of years late for correspondence.
Then there is the problem of the list.
Secret Santa cannot function without at least one omniscient administrator. Someone knows the full roster of who gives to whom. The participants themselves stagger around in happy ignorance, but the system as such is fully mapped. There is a complete table somewhere, often written in an alarming hand on the back of a menu. Should scandal arise, the keepers of the list can reconstruct the entire sequence of unfortunate decisions.
Heredity, it appears, is governed by a similar impertinence. The body carries its own list. It is not a list we can read with the naked eye, of course; even the most ambitious historian has yet to shelve it between “Gibbon” and “Goethe.” But there is, so to speak, a full ledger in the cells. All contributors are recorded in code, down to the more furtive great‑grandmothers, the misfiled cousins, and the prehistoric stranger who briefly joined the family and then vanished into the snow.
We, the conscious occupants, do not possess that information in any immediately useful way. We tell ourselves clean, linear stories about our descent—“Grandfather was this, Grandmother was that; there was a Viking somewhere; nobody mentions the bankruptcy”—while the body quietly remembers different, more entangled things. The narrative is edited; the list is not.
It is a curious reversal of religious practice. In the pulpit one often hears that God has a book in which all our deeds are written, whereas we strive to forget as many of them as possible. In heredity the book is written inside us, and we are the ones who pretend it is shorter. The theologian Mr. Frobisher in his now mercifully unobtainable pamphlet On the Roll‑Call of Souls (York, 1898) declared, “No act is lost; all shall be revealed.” He meant it as a comfort. Had he seen a modern family quarrel over ancestry, he might have reconsidered.
There is also the matter of embarrassment.
When the party is over and the secret Santa is finally revealed, there is a delicate moment. The gift, so safe while disembodied, acquires a face. If it is ghastly, you must look that face in the eye and say something kind about the ashtray shaped like a walrus. If it is heartbreakingly thoughtful, the embarrassment is worse. Gratitude, in close quarters, is almost indecent.
Our discoveries about those anonymous ancestral donors have produced something similar. The realisation that present populations carry traces of vanished cousins has been greeted in certain respectable quarters with a kind of moral flinching. There is a long tradition of writing histories in which we were always ourselves, always pure, always the natural end‑point of the story. To wake up and discover that the story contains uncredited collaborators is unsettling.
The more excitable popular journals have not helped. The Illustrated Phrenologist (special Christmas number, 1910) ran a headline: “Are You Part Caveman? New Science Says Yes!” To which the only scientific reply is that we have all always been part something. The labels have changed; the principle has not.
Yet the discomfort persists, like a draught in a respectable parlour. It is one thing to acknowledge, abstractly, that human populations have always mixed. It is another to be told, with indecent specificity, that your immune system is the grateful possessor of some long‑forgotten neighbour’s experiments in surviving winter.
The deepest affinity, however, lies not in embarrassment but in design.
In both secret Santa and the ancestral net, the concealment is not deception; it is the condition of the gift.
The Christmas arrangement only works because the giver is hidden. It is understood that no one will stand up and announce, “That was from me—I spent tuppence and thought of you for nearly six minutes.” The point is not merely to prevent boasting; it is to allow the gift to be received without the whole orchestra of obligation. For a brief moment, the object appears as if from nowhere. It is pure addition, not part of a bargain.
So too with those ghost populations. They did not hide themselves behind trees or under mythological names, waiting, like shy benefactors in a sentimental novel, to be discovered at the last chapter. They did what populations do: encountered, mingled, separated, dissolved. They were not keeping a secret. They simply ceased to be present, leaving behind only the things that happened to persist.
The secret, such as it is, exists only from the point of view of the later recipients, who insist on asking, “Yes, but who was it?” The universe, which has never shown particular interest in tidy authorial attribution, offers no answer. The gift remains. The giver is not concealed; the giver is gone.
Here, as the theosophical Miss Meriel Swann wrote rather gloomily in The Anonymous Angels (1903), “We are haunted less by those who visit us than by those whose deeds we live in ignorance of.” She was speaking of guardian spirits; one suspects she would have been less enthusiastic had she known they might be Neolithic.
There is, of course, one major difference, and I must acknowledge it in case the reader feels inclined to complain to the editor. The domestic secret Santa resolves at the party. At some point, whether through official revelation or the uncontrollable leakage characteristic of any English institution, you learn who gave you the regrettable paperweight. The anonymity collapses, and everyone laughs more loudly than necessary.
The hereditary version does not resolve. Not fully, not finally. Even should we someday reconstruct a splendid, densely annotated map of the ancestral net, there will be ghosts in the corners: populations inferred but never named, crossings that left no trace we can recognise, contributions folded so thoroughly into the fabric that they can only be guessed at. You carry the gift and the anonymity together, like an heirloom whose inscription has worn away.
Religion has been rehearsing this situation for centuries. There are doctrines which insist that every good thing is, ultimately, from an unseen donor whose identity one is expected to infer but not inspect too closely. “All gifts descend from above,” writes the Reverend T. P. Callender in God and the Gift‑Horse (Salisbury, 1902), “and the wise man does not require a return address.” He might, if pressed, admit that the arrangement favours the sender.
Our genetic benefactors have no such theological protections. They did not ask to be remembered; we, for reasons of curiosity, insecurity, or sheer professional habit, insist on remembering them anyway. We chase them through bone fragments and statistical phantoms, anxious archivists of a great party whose guest list was mislaid.
The comedy, if you will conspire with me for a moment, is that we now stand in both roles. We are the baffled recipients of ancestral gifts, and we are also the blithe givers to future people who will not know, or care, that some slight advantage in their lungs or some faint predisposition to melancholic humour was wrapped up in us. We are the secret Santa of the year 40,000, and we will not be invited to the party.
It is possible that some future historian, sitting under a different kind of lamp, will attempt to reconstruct our part in their inheritance. They will rummage among the remains of our records, note that we were very proud of certain ideas and very quiet about others, and deduce, quite wrongly, what we were trying to give. They will publish a monograph. Their colleagues will disagree.
The gifts, indifferent, will already be in place.
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