The Invisible History of the Human Race Quotes

“The history of the world may be writ in your cells, all of it personal to your lineage and some of it part of the broader context, but though you have been shaped by history, you have only been shaped by some of it. Fundamentally,”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. —Golda Meir”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“not put in place, one wonders how insurance and pharmaceutical companies will treat our grandchildren if they have genetic information about them, perhaps even before they are even conceived. Insurance”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“It is extremely unlikely that anyone in the twenty-first century does not have some consanguinity in his or her family within the last three hundred years. Yet according to Feldman, more than half of all human populations today still engage in consanguineous marriage, and up to 10 percent of all humans are in first- or second-cousin marriages.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“Despite the availability of testing, at least half of the population at risk for Huntington’s disease still has children without making use of the new technologies. Even some of the people who have prenatal testing for Huntington’s still have a profound reluctance to learn their own status. Couples who try preimplantation genetic diagnosis may even conceive a child and choose not to find out if the parent at risk has the mutation. Deciding”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“Better: DNA, History, and Health The”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“There is evidence from ancient DNA that lighter skin, hair, and eye pigmentation was strongly selected for in Europe in just the last five thousand years.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“One of the most important implications of own-race bias is that in eyewitness situations the testimony of a witness may be considered less reliable if the accused is of a different race. Most”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“Some parts of the genome with a high frequency of Neanderthal variants shape hair and skin color and likely made the first Eurasians lighter-skinned than their African ancestors.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“What is perhaps most confusing about the criticism of this kind of genetic research is that its detractors often cite one of the most popular ideas of the human genome era: namely, that DNA reveals that race is a myth and that beneath the skin we are all fundamentally the same. But how can this be true when another consequence of the human genome era is that we can now have our genome analyzed and our racial history quantified? Does race exist in our genes or just in our heads?  •”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“once spoke about the genetics of ancestry with a Holocaust historian who had hunted some of the last surviving Nazis in the 1990s. When I told him that little letters in our genetic code might testify to the ethnicity of our parents and grandparents, he said, “The Nazis would have loved this.” They would certainly have seized upon the idea, but in the end the full picture would have let them down just as badly as all the other dubious measures of race they tried to develop.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“You may discover that a certain sequence of letters in your autosomal DNA is typically found in someone with Finnish heritage or Korean ancestry. Only a few years ago the world of science was turned upside down when it was discovered that in ancient times two nonhuman species contributed to the human genome.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“As of 2014 a small handful of well-known companies—Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, and AncestryDNA.com, as well as National Geographic’s Genographic Project—and services offer a selection of DNA tests and genealogical connections to the general public.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“Study the past if you would define the future. —Confucius O”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“In one of the most remarkable studies of the transmission of ideas over time, the economists Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth found evidence that animosity endured generation after generation, for as long as six hundred years. Voigtländer”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“As a graduate student Nathan Nunn, now a Harvard economist, began to compare different economies in modern Africa, and he found that the countries that lost more people to the slave trade were also the poorest countries today. How”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“The nineteenth-century German missionary Sigismund Koelle asked over 140 ex-slaves how they had been taken. Almost 20 percent of them told him that family or friends had given them up.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“Africans believed they were being captured and shipped over the ocean to be eaten. The insecurity of life in a world of slavery is hard to imagine, let alone the extraordinary length of time that the threat of abduction loomed.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“genealogy companies have quietly and steadily expanded to become some of the biggest data organizations of the twenty-first century.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“Remember Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the illegitimate daughter of Senator Strom Thurmond? She said, “There are many stories like Sally Hemings and mine. [Hemings, a slave, had children fathered by the United States president Thomas Jefferson. See chapter 11.] The unfortunate measure is that not everyone knows about these stories that helped to make America what it is today.” What America is today is a nation where the Supreme Court has ruled that all states must allow same-sex marriage.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“The problem of rapidly evolving technologies or “digital migration” was rather alarmingly illustrated in England in the 1980s with a considerably larger amount of information. Actually, it began in 1086 with the Domesday Book. The first public record ever made in England, the Domesday Book was instigated by William the Conqueror, who wished to take a census of his people and, more specifically, their possessions.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“Today the Church has 220 data-gathering teams in forty-five countries that are making digital copies of new records. They are also converting 2.4 million microfilm records into a digital format.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“All the industry that the Mormons have devoted to assembling genealogical records is not just for church members. “We provide our records for everybody,” Verkler explained. “We think that it’s doing good for the world.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“Totalitarian power thrives when it alienates people from basic information about themselves. When European slavers abducted people from Africa, they essentially took away their history as well.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“Indeed, the ancestral proof that Nazis began to require of German citizens would not have been possible without the formalization of genealogy that began in imperial Germany and continued through the Weimar era. Even”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“History,” wrote the researchers, “is always ending today.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“The researchers found that although everyone initially opted in and made appointments to follow up and receive personal risk information, many didn’t turn up to their first appointment to learn more about the condition, and fewer still turned up for the second, at which they would have received their results. This was interpreted as suggesting that people didn’t want to know what their risk factor was. But what if the declining response was actually an indication that people are busy and that if institutions make it too hard to obtain information, subjects won’t make an effort to pursue it? It may be not the fear of risk but the significant time commitment that’s getting in the way of people’s learning about preventable conditions.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“It is well known that onset of the disease is affected by lifestyle, yet even when the at-risk subjects were given information about their susceptibility, many did not adjust their fat intake or increase exercise or consult medical specialists to minimize their risk.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“Although Winkler had always known that his family had Native American and white ancestry, this new affiliation was a complete surprise. “I had always assumed that my dad’s family was mostly Indian, because that’s what they looked like and that’s what they always said,” Winkler recalled. When he eventually asked his father why he had always described himself as being an Indian, his father replied, “Everybody knows what an Indian is. It takes all day to explain what a Melungeon is.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

“In 2008 geneticists at the University of York discovered that mice have left genetic trails in much the same way as humans. Rodents that traveled into Orkney on Viking ships ended up leaving much of their DNA in the mouse populations on the island. Indeed, the Scandinavian mice left a pattern so clear that scientists have found they can draw an accurate map of human movements based on mouse movements alone. A more recent study tracked marauding mice of the early tenth century into Greenland from Iceland and before that from either Norway or the northern part of Britain.”
― Christine Kenneally, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures