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January 4 - January 19, 2019
everyone’s past becomes muddled sooner or later.
By consensus, history begins with writing.
the length of time life has existed on Earth were represented as this book, each character, including spaces, is around 5,957 years. Anatomically modern humans’ tenure on Earth is equivalent to . . . the precise length of this phrase.
Biology is the study of what lives and therefore what dies. It’s messy—wonderfully, frustratingly so—and imprecise and defies definitions.
Nowadays, only the willfully ignorant dismiss the truth that we evolved from earlier ancestors.
Remember that the subject of evolutionary change is DNA, but classification does not depend upon that.
An army led by Ivar the Boneless, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye,
The Vikings might not have been as bloodthirsty as popular depictions; they farmed and wrote and created great art.
Iceland is a weird place. The living landscape is virtually extraterrestrial—glacial and barren, volcanic and lunar, and its culture and language rich and bewitching.
Its latitude means that the winters are black all day, and the summer sun barely dips below the horizon. Even the neighboring Scandinavian countries think the Icelanders are a bit odd.
the Icelandic Sagas, collectively one of the most important European texts. Written over a sixty-year period, they contain events of world-changing significance, such as the first steps of European feet on North American lands, and plenty of ghosts and trolls, sex, violence, drinking, and subsequent puking, as surely befits the Viking reputation.
Every known organism has parasites, and the relationship between host and predator has been a major driver of many aspects of evolution.
the blind indifference of natural selection.
In some senses, archaeology was waiting for genetics to come along to provide a measure that was dependent on unimaginable oceans of time in order for it to make sense.
In fact, in most fossils from which DNA can be retrieved, only 1 percent is of the organism itself, the rest being contaminating bacteria that have been feeding off
the remains for thousands if not tens of thousands of years.
We can see now where the genes came from, and how culture, specifically farming culture, changed our DNA permanently.
We sometimes forget that though the data should be pure and straightforward, science is done by people, who are never either.
But we are the data, and people are not there for the benefit of others, regardless of how noble one’s scientific aims are.
the most recent common ancestor of everyone alive today on Earth lived only around 3,400 years ago.
When we look to the past and to our presumed genetic ancestry to understand and explain our own behaviors today, it is not much better than astrology. The genes of your forebears have very little influence over you.
This is how astrology works—divination drawn from banality, that we are complicit in. We
cling to the things that appeal, and happily ignore the rest.
How odd that our ancestors are never identified as dimwits, or shoe sales...
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Ancestry is messy and difficult. Genetics is messy and mathematical, but powerful if deployed in the right way.
No scientific test exists that will tell you where the DNA that you would come to inherit was precisely located in the past.
The unglamorous truth is that there are but a handful of uniquely human traits that we have clearly demonstrated are adaptations evolved to thrive in specific geographical regions.
The persistence of sickle cell anemia is the cost of positive selection for
resistance against the most destructive disease in our history.
We are naturally plagued by the tyranny of a discontinuous mind, as Richard Dawkins so eloquently said.
Science is a process that strives to excise our limited view of the universe and our inbuilt prejudices
from understanding an objective reality. Things are often not as they appear to us, but we invented and developed the scientific process to correct our subjective failings: Data is king.
Every scientist knows that the most productive conversations happen in the bar.
Ignorance is the position from which we work out what is correct.
As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
The greatest achievement of the Human Genome Project was working out exactly how little we knew—known unknowns.
If the paucity of genes was the first great revelation of the Human Genome Project, the second was that almost all the genome is not genes at all.
Every cell contains every gene, but will only require a handful of genes to be active at any one time.
Nothing relieves one of the obligation to behave civilized.”
Are we slaves or masters of our genes? We are neither, and it’s a dumb, simplistic question.
To say otherwise is a biological determinism with profound legal consequences. Of course, this is not new to the justice system, it is merely that now genetics is coming of age, it is now part of the pantheon of legal defenses and excuses for predestination. A gene that has a measurable association with violence if the bearer was beaten as a child is not irrelevant.
The subtleties of brain activity, and the resolution of thought at the cellular level are precise and minuscule.
These brain scans are informative but not definitive, though this is not the impression one might get from reading the news. Placing them in the context of court, where judgments rely on evidence, the doubt so crucial to science confounds decisions.
What a strange eldritch world is the business of dead celebrity body parts.
Journals are not all equal, and publication in a journal is not a mark of truth, merely that the research has passed a standard that warrants entering formal literature and further discussion with other scientists.
No one will ever find a gene for “evil,” or for beauty, or for musical genius, or for scientific
genius, because they don’t exist.
Inheritance is a game of probability, not of destiny.
Most human traits, behaviors, and diseases are complex, with dozens or hundreds of genes playing a small part in concert
with the inscrutable milieu in which they operate.
