The Great Family of Life

Where does my family end? At my parents and siblings? At my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins? At my in-laws? At my second cousins? At my friends? At my neighbours? At humans? At apes, mammals, animals…? In fact, we can continue to extend the concept of kinship to the most distant and modest bacterium, which descends, like Homo sapiens, from a single common ancestor and is made, like us, from five nucleotides whose combinations determine the stock of Life.