An organism’s genome is a tapestry of her ancestors’ genomes.

"Living humans are endowed with the evolutionary history of our species in our genomes. It is as if we permanently carry a photograph of each of our ancestors in our wallets" —Siddhartha Mukherjee

An entity is an interweaving of the elements that comprise its predecessors.

“[A]ny text is an intertext; other texts are present in it, at varying levels…the texts of the previous and surrounding culture. Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of codes, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc. pass into the text and are redistributed within it…“

—Roland Barthes

Analogous motifs in the storyline

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer portrays collective memory as heredity.

Analogous arrangements in narrative structure

Intertextuality as exemplified in Ana Menéndez’s Adios, Happy Homeland!

“Indeed, in many ways books are living organisms with “pasts” that bear on their beings.” —Ana Menéndez