A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

by Adam Rutherford

MC1R Val60Leu. I carry a mutation for ginger hair. At position sixty in the MC1R protein, instead

Our findings suggest a remarkable proposition: no matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

The further back we go, the more the certainty of ancestry increases, though the knowledge of our ancestors decreases. It is simultaneously wonderful, trivial, meaningless, and fun.

Mind you, Darwin fretted about a lot of stuff, especially his health, his kids, and maybe with just cause. On occasion he would write a fit of histrionic despair, such as “I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything,” and once, evoking the spirit of eugenics soon to be invented by his cousin, Francis Galton, about whom we will hear more later:

There are no essential genetic elements for any particular group of people who might be identified as a “race.” As far as genetics is concerned, race does not exist.

It’s the same for heart disease. And schizophrenia. And drug addiction. And Alzheimer’s. And autism. And diabetes. And bipolar disorder. And intelligence. And pretty much any condition, disease, and behavior we have looked at. Genes do not determine the outcome of almost all human biology and psychology. Dozens or hundreds of genes can be involved, each with small cumulative effects, and all mitigated by the world in which we live.

These conditions are all miserably predictable. Their DNA was already set in place. But the unborn would face a different set of problems. For children in utero, maternal malnutrition has an effect on the expression of their genes, which would be altered and disrupted. The result for the children of the Hongerwinter was a set of health problems that would persist throughout their lives. Compared to the general population, and compared to siblings who were conceived either before or after the famine, they were smaller and underweight. They were more likely to be obese, diabetic, and schizophrenic, and to suffer from cardiovascular diseases and breast cancer.

Prenatal malnutrition - Dutch famine

The book Native American DNA by Kim TallBear is the definitive

Interesting book to read