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

by Adam Rutherford

endogamy.

ghee

zombie arguments*

In science, a theory is the best description we have. Unlike the common usage, it’s not a guess, or a hunch, or a hypothesis. It’s the most complete subjective picture of the living world that we have. It’s not truth, because that is the realm of math, religion, and philosophy.

The standard ranking is Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. I was taught this with the memorable if not kind mnemonic, “kings play cards on fat girls’ stomachs,” though there are plenty of other versions. “King Philip came over for group sex”

It’s often said that the nursery rhyme “Ring a Ring of Roses” is a plague incantation, with the roses being reddened marks preceding buboes, “a pocket full of posies” some kind of traditional herbal protection and, of course, “we all fall down” (and also possibly “ashes, ashes”) being representative of an inevitable death. However, this is almost certainly a twentieth-century post hoc analysis, and is rejected by most academic folklorists.

tautologically

The Middle English name for orchid is bollockwort. This deserves to be reintroduced to polite contemporary society.

Punching racists is not necessarily something that I would encourage or endorse.

The pink thing is complete nonsense for a couple of reasons: the first is that the gender preferences for pink are a twentieth-century phenomenon. The color schemes in Victorian children’s bedrooms were frequently pink for boys, blue for girls.

Which is called Creation: The Origin of Life & The Future of Life (Viking, 2013).

Life’s Greatest Secret

documentaries for BBC Radio 4 covering this topic, Intelligence: Born Smart, Born Equal, Born Different, which are available for free for an indefinite period.

This is an area of research that is characterized as being “opinion rich, data poor.” A paper, which I coauthored in 2016, attempted to address the question of levels of violence in video games and subsequent delinquent behavior in teens. We found a very weak effect, which was probably underpowered. It’s not a very headline-grabbing result, but that’s science, folks.

Godwin’s Law (the tendency for an online discussion to cite Hitler increases as the discussion continues)

Betteridge’s Law (if a headline poses a question, the answer is likely to be no).

My suggested narcissistic law could be stated thus: if a headline states that “Scientists have discovered the gene for X,” where X is a complex human trait, th...

My editor insisted that there was not room for two flapdoodles in one book, so here is an equivalent word for tosh, baboonery, claptrap, flimflam, rannygazoo, baloney, or just plain old nonsense.

Comic book superheroes reinvent themselves every few years, and he acquired biological silk production only in the 2002 film—a teenage boy emitting white sticky fluid as some sort of allegory for something or other.

Of course, the eye is frequently the weapon of choice of creationists in the eye-rollingly tedious ongoing battle between fact and those unencumbered by fact. “The eye,” they bleat, “is too complex and perfect to have evolved by chance!” A squid might agree, but try telling that to someone with cataracts, myopia, strabismus, microphthalmia, aniridia, presbyopia, detached retina, glaucoma, color blindness, or any of the dozens of design flaws that are either a result of evolution’s lack of foresight, or a really rubbish designer.

Unthinking and mindless, tired and drooling, relentlessly shuffling along, impervious to reason, intelligence, or debate, and desperately ugly.