Viewers of THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS recently learned that ever-principled Cane actually has a mysterious scheme in the works — one that would seem very Chancellor-like...if he is indeed Jill's son!

Whether that first DNA test was a false negative or the second one a false positive is open to speculation, but portrayer Daniel Goddard thinks Cane is a Chancellor — and he is talking genetics. "It's the classic question of nature versus nurture," Goddard suggests. "Katherine is sure he can do the job she hired him for, because he has Chancellor blood in him. It's part of his intelligence and who he is."

But genetics is not everything. "You have to wonder about Cane’s 'uncle,’ the man who raised Cane but was not related to him in any form," notes Goddard. "We don't know how this person treated Cane or made him feel, but Cane would have gained much from him. As a man growing up without a mother figure, you gravitate toward what you have.

"You wonder whether the DNA will usurp the indoctrination or vice versa,” he ponders. “That’s what we're going to find out about, and that's very interesting for me, because I'm a huge fan of genetics."

Goddard is also studying the subject of inherited traits at home, where he is recognizing similarities between himself and his son, Ford, who is just over 2 years old. "He has to pick up each pencil, inspect it and compare it to the others. He'll see that they're the same, but different," says the proud pop. "Like me with my scripts, everything is about the details. I mark them up, 'What does this line mean? What does that refer to?' Everything is atoms put together, so how do I pull the atoms apart?"

Luckily, however, neither father nor son exhibits the convict traits that brought Goddard's ancestors to Australia in the 1800s. "My mom is on that trail. She knows 'we' were on [the convict ships from England], through my dad's side of the family, but it's hard to find what people actually did to end up on the ships," he reveals. "For me, it's a claim to fame, but you can track a large portion of white Australians back to those ships."

While Goddard quips that the gene must have become diluted over the years, it does come in handy for the missus. "When Rachel wants to get a rise out of me, she always defaults to, 'It's that convict blood!' Yup! Nature versus nurture, baby."