Amanda

“We geneticists may be the barbarians coming late to the study of the human past, but it is always a bad idea to ignore barbarians.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past

“Chickens—lowly chickens!—have a rhodopsin for low-light conditions, four color-sensing pigments, and a pigment in their pineal glands (uninventively called pinopsin) that uses light to help set their circadian rhythm. That’s quite a bit of color, but chickens aren’t so lowly, really. They’re the evolutionary offspring of dinosaurs, after all.”
― Adam Rogers, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern

“But science’s biggest flaw and biggest virtue is that it almost always mistakes agreement for truth.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

“Ten generations back, for example, the number of ancestral stretches of DNA is around 757 but the number of ancestors is 1,024, guaranteeing that each person has several hundred ancestors from whom he or she has received no DNA whatsoever.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past