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

by Adam Rutherford

We don’t really know what this steroid does in or for people, if anything at all, though it is found in sweat. But if you’re a pig, then it’s the main way you get laid.

The only life forms that don’t change are dead ones.

Most people, for most of human history, will have experienced a full deck of problems that come with drinking milk past weaning.

Alas, a fiction can fly around the world before the truth has managed to pick the sleep from its eyes in the morning.

That is difficult to explain, but it highlights the complexities of human genetics that we are only just beginning to understand.

We sometimes forget that though the data should be pure and straightforward, science is done by people, who are never either.

the idea that tribal status is encoded in DNA is both simplistic and wrong.

DNA is a historical source that is complementary to others, and geneticists should avoid the temptation to assert its supremacy over other ways of knowing the past and of knowing a people.

In 2013, geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop showed that DNA says exactly the same thing as Chang’s mathematical ancestry: Our family trees are not trees at all, but entangled meshes.

As far as genetics is concerned, race does not exist.

The great irony is this: The science of genetics was founded specifically on the study of racial inequality, by a racist.

science is the opposite of common sense. It’s a set of methodological tools that attempt to extract objective reality from how we perceive it. Science sets aside the bias that we lug around, and separates what feels right from what is.

Being wrong is the backbone of science,

Metaphors in science should clarify or enlighten, not obfuscate because they sound profound.

When it comes to humans, the simple, direct, understandable answers are likely to be wrong.

There is no crisis. There is only science.

All these studies are flawed, as are all scientific papers to some degree.

the statistical relationship between playing violent video games and enacting murder is irrelevant. Because games are so widespread, statistically, the idea of a causal link between violent video games and murderous violence is absurd.

100 percent of mass shootings have been enabled by access to guns. I can guarantee that even if there were a genotype shared by the mass shooters, which there will not be, none of the killings would have happened if they didn’t have guns.

publication in a journal is not a mark of truth,

DNA is not destiny.

You have acquired through nothing other than chance at least 100 mutations that are unique to you.

we invented almost all our own foods via that ancient form of genetic engineering better known as farming,

If this all sounds a bit inconclusive as this book draws to its end, that, happily, is the nature of science.