I confess I don’t fully understand how this whole “genetics” thing works. I have, or, more accurately, had blond hair and blue eyes. Wendy has blond hair and blue eyes, and both of our children have blond hair and blue eyes. I get that.

Wendy can sing on key and has some innate musical ability. Both Adam and Lauren have some innate musical ability. I have whatever the opposite of innate musical ability is – genetic musical disability, I suppose. I sort of get that. My innate musical disability must be some sort of recessive or “wimpy” gene as opposed to a dominant or “macho” gene.

I am a “morning person.” Neither Adam or Lauren is a morning person; both of them are “‘night owls.” You’d have to describe Wendy as a “mid-morning-to-late-afternoon person.”

I am an excellent driver. Wendy thinks she is an excellent driver. Neither of the kids is anything close to being an excellent driver.

I had braces on my teeth as a high school student. Both Adam and Lauren had braces on their teeth as high schoolers. Wendy had braces on her teeth in her late 40s.

I like Mexican food, cheap beer and working out in the yard. Wendy likes Mexican food, expensive wine and “helping” me work out in the yard by starting new gardening projects and creating debris piles where none previously existed. Both of our kids like Mexican food, any beverage containing equal parts corn syrup and carbonation, and when I’m looking for someone to help me work out in the yard, neither can be found. I don’t know where they go –

my current theory is that they have acquired a chameleon-like ability to shift their coloring to blend in with the wallpaper or couch whenever they hear the sound of the lawnmower starting up.

I’m surprised neither Charles Darwin nor Gregor Mendel ever noted that phenomenon. (Now that I think about it, I may have confused Mendel with the guy who played the cockroach in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.)

I could continue with other irrefutable scientific examples, but I think I’ve made my point about genetics, assuming I had a point to make in the first place, which is debatable, and that’s totally unsupported by past experience and built on a shaky foundation untroubled by fact or reality.

I had not thought much about genetics since I botched my high school biology experiment with Drosophila melanogaster, more commonly known as the common fruit fly. Fruit flies were popular subjects for high school experiments because of their low intelligence, high fertility rates and indiscriminate breeding habits. But enough about Britney Spears, we were talking about genetics and mutations and natural selection, all of which has become clear and fascinating to me now that I no longer have to worry about being quizzed on it by Mr. Chang.

I’m particularly interested these days in adaptation in animals, and the phenomena of vestigial structures such as the non-functional remains of eyes in blind, cave-dwelling fish, wings on flightless birds, and the presence of hip bones in whales and snakes. We humans also have our own vestigial structures such as wisdom teeth, appendixes and backbones in politicians.

One of the great things about biological evolution is that you can understand it and accept it and study it without really knowing exactly how life began on earth. In other words, the origin of life is a necessary precursor to biological evolution, but biological evolution itself does not depend on understanding exactly how life began.

There is no scientific disagreement that all organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor or ancestral gene pool. And there seems to be scientific consensus that the first organism to inhabit the earth was something called a prokaryote, a one-celled creature from the distinguished family of algae, fungi, slime molds and bacteria. But nobody is exactly sure when or how these prokaryotes rose from the primordial soup and started walking, talking, paying taxes and yearning for exotic coffee drinks and cell phones that take pictures.

Based on subsequent events in human history, I’m guessing the first prokaryotes to leave the common mud hole were expelled by a fanatical cadre of zealous amoebas or protozoa who worshipped a different all-powerful single-celled God. Maybe evolution teaches us that while we’ve come a long way, we really haven’t gotten very far.

Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper. This is from his “Classic’s Files” written years ago.