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

by Adam Rutherford

Lots of real scientific terms get borrowed for a spot of buzzword scienceyness.

mystical thinking is never welcome in science.

We have externalized the stomach with the invention of cooking, so we don’t have to digest a whole range of chewy molecules, because they are already partly broken down by our unique control of elemental fire.

insects have acquired and shed wings seemingly willy-nilly in their evolutions as they confer advantage or not for the genes they carry.

They are to evade predators, or to gain access to food, or to show off to the females—all pretty standard reasons for having any evolved trait.

We fly all the time. We have no need to fly unaided. There is no ecological niche that could be filled by aerial people.

The subtler questions of alleles that reduce or enhance reproductive success, or the health that underlies that, are really what’s at stake in the future evolution of our species.

The theories behind why we evolved three-color vision are wide and varied. Many of them suppose that the ability to discriminate the redness of berries in a busy green forest canopy would be of great advantage to our foraging simian ancestors swinging in the

As long as humans keep having sex and that sex results in more humans, then we are evolving.

our numbers as a species have increased more than a thousandfold since we started farming.

Of these differences, three quarters had arisen in the last 5,000 years. Are we still evolving? The answer again is an undeniable yes: We’re a species not of mutants but of mutations.

Approximately 164,688 of these single changes in our DNA are probably not good news. They’re changes to the DNA that alter proteins subtly, but probably making the pr...

This release that we have invented from the harshness of nature means that evolution with selection is likely to have radically slowed, though not stopped.

Traits never evolve in isolation from the environment or each other.

It’s no secret that arguing with creationists is a waste of time, for they see things differently from most. They know that what they think is true, and in science we must assume we are wrong. We know that we doubt everything we know is correct. When it becomes harder and

harder to find things wrong with your ideas and experiments, then it’s probably a good sign you’re on the right track.

Outside science, there is some understandable confusion about what that word means. 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. In science we simply lean in toward truth, every step inching us closer to the way things actually are, rather than how we perceive them to be, or would like them to

Life is a chemical reaction. Life is derived from what came before. Life is imperfect copying. Life is the accumulation and refinement of information embedded in DNA. Natural selection explains how, once it had started, life evolved on Earth.

Evolution is change plus time.

there has never been anyone quite like you before, and there never will be again. Your face, your physiology, your metabolism, your experience, your family, your DNA, and your history are the contrivances of cosmic happenstance in a fully indifferent universe. We’re unique in our DNA, but it was drawn from millions

of past lives.