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

by Adam Rutherford

Science is apt to reveal that much of the world is not how we perceive it, whether that is the cosmological, the molecular, the atomic, or the subatomic. These fields are distant or abstract compared with how we talk about families, about inheritance, about race, about intelligence, and about history.

genetics won’t tell you how smart your kids will be, or what sports they should play, or what gender person they might fancy, or how they will die, or why some people commit acts of heinous violence and murder.

Just as important as what genetics can tell us is what it can’t.

Biology is the study of what lives and therefore what dies. It’s messy—wonderfully, frustratingly so—and imprecise and defies definitions.

Nothing living is fixed, and all creatures are four dimensional, existing in space, and also through time.

This iconic image implies something that we now know is untrue. We just don’t know the pathway of the apes that led to us. We know many of the creatures en route, but the map is full of gaps and smears.

Nowadays, only the willfully ignorant dismiss the truth that we evolved from earlier ancestors.