A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived Quotes

“We look to statistics for reassurance in these types of situations. Here is one: 100% of mass shootings have been enabled by access to guns. I can guarantee that even if there were a genotype shared by the mass shooters, which there will not be, none of the killings would have happened if they didn't have guns.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“And then there are huge chunks of DNA that are just repeated sections. And then there are huge chunks of DNA that are just repeated sections. And then there are huge chunks of DNA that are just repeated sections.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“Alas, we are no more or less evolved than any creature. Uniqueness is terribly overrated.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“We sometimes forget that though the data should be pure and straightforward, science is done by people, who are never either.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“none of the ways in which we talk about race today stands up to the scrutiny that genetics has enabled. Families are too untidy, human history is too convoluted, people too motile. The deck has been shuffled and reshuffled. Genetics has shown that people are different, and these differences cluster according to geography and culture, but never in a way that aligns with the traditional concepts of human races.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“In the words of Dr. Seuss: Today you are you! That is truer than true!
There is no one alive who is you-er than you!”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“Evolution, blind and slow, has not inched along over billions of years with any intention that it should be decipherable to one or any of its billions of children.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“Genetics is messy and mathematical, but powerful if deployed in the right way. People are horny. Lives are complex. A secret history is truly hidden in the mosaics of our genomes, but caveat emptor. No”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“Everyone alive in the tenth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne, and his children Drogo, Pippin and, of course, not forgetting Hugh. If”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“Are we slaves or masters of our genes? We are neither, and it’s a dumb, simplistic question.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“Almost all science is done by very normal people”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“Mind you, Darwin fretted about a lot of stuff, especially his health, his kids, and maybe with just cause. On occasion he would write a fit of histrionic despair, such as “I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything,”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“Except if you’re of European descent. Your lactase continues to work throughout your life. This unusual phenomenon is called lactase persistence, and although a splash of milk in tea is the English way, and even a mug of hot chocolate might seem very normal to us, we are the weird ones.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“In the penultimate stages of writing this book, the date of the great exodus from Africa may have shifted more than 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, following the discovery of forty-seven modern teeth in China. Then in the final stages it moved back by another 20,000 years with the detection of Homo sapiens DNA in a millennia-dead Neanderthal girl. These numbers are not much in evolutionary terms, ripples in geological time. But that is much more than the whole of written human history, and so the land continually and dramatically moves under our feet.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“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. DNA is not destiny. The presence of a particular variant of a particular gene may just have the effect of altering the odds of any particular behavior. More likely, the possession of many slight differences in many genes will have an effect on the likelihood of a particular characteristic, in consort with your environment, which includes all things that are not DNA.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“Charles Darwin formulated his idea 50 years before genes, 100 before the double helix, and 150 before the human genome was read. But they all say the same thing. 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. We busy ourselves refining the theory, and working out the details with a scrutiny and precision that has been enabled and invigorated by reading genome after genome, and crunching those numbers until comprehensible patterns emerge. We are the data.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge . . . says Darwin in The Descent of Man, his”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“Furthermore, some researchers have suggested a strong association with the presence of the protective gene in populations who have historically farmed yams. To plant yams, farmers clear forests. Cleared forest means more standing water. More standing water means more mosquitoes. More mosquitoes means more malaria—so the idea goes. The emergence of the disease, and as a consequence the resistance gene, may well have been enabled, or at least nurtured, by yam farming. The persistence of sickle cell anemia is the cost of positive selection for resistance against the most destructive disease in our history.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“brain activity in a heartbeat. All of that says Richard. But the DNA in consort with the paper trail of a genealogy available only for royalty says this was him. Richard III is now the oldest person to be unequivocally identified in death.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“By 5500 BCE, we were making cheese. Sieves and pottery colanders resembling modern cheese strainers had been found in Poland, and in 2012, again, telltale residues were scraped off these ancient dishes. The suboptimal washing-up skills of the people who owned this crockery again revealed fat from milk. Cheese, of course, is a strange thing in itself, and odd that we should eat it. It’s milk that has gone bad, probably the first processed food, but it may have been a useful way of storing the nutrient-rich milk in solid form, possibly more like a glob of mozzarella than a wheel of Stilton.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“it’s hard to see what the evolutionary advantage might be for lactase persistence in the absence of a regular supply of fresh milk. And so we think of this as a classic example of how we have invoked shifts in our genome with our own practices—a gene-culture coevolution—experienced only in communities that were practicing dairy farming with domesticated milky beasts. What advantage having both access to milk and the ability to process it might seem obvious: In fact, it’s really the realm of intelligent but speculative guesswork. A regular supply of nutritionally rich food is one; avoiding the boom and bust cycles of seasonal crops is another possibility. By 6,000 years ago, milk had become a part of Neolithic life.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“the most recent common ancestor of everyone alive today on Earth lived only around 3,400 years ago”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“And yes, genetics appears to play a role in about half the total risk for being alcohol addicted. But there’s no evidence that Native Americans have any versions of genes that metabolize alcohol any differently from white people in America, nor is there a simple single genetic factor that might render someone an alcoholic. There is plenty of evidence for brutal social and cultural experiences for many Native Americans, and generations of oppression, resulting in underemployment, poverty, and low socioeconomic status, all of which are risk factors for alcoholism. Yet, the notion that the high rates of alcoholism in Native Americans—almost twice as high as in white European immigrant Americans—are somehow genetic remains an oft-repeated idea.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“Human history is replete with the fluid movement of people, and tribes and countries and cultures and empires are never, ever permanent. Over a long enough time-scale, not one of these descriptions of historical people holds steadfast, and only a thousand years ago your DNA began being threaded from millions from every culture, tribe, and country. If you want to spend your cash on someone in a white coat telling you that you’re from a tribe of wandering Germanic topless warriors, or descended from Vikings, Saracens, Saxons, or Drogo of Metz, or even the Great Emperor Charlemagne, help yourself. I, or hundreds of geneticists around the world, will shrug and do it for free: You are. And you don’t even need to spit in a tube—your majesty.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“For our purposes, if we are to look at the evolution that led to where we are now, instead of the nice neat tree, I think it could reasonably be described as one big million-year clusterfuck. Whenever humans met - Sapiens, Neanderthal, Denisovans - they had sex. What a time to be alive.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“Humans are both horny and mobile.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“A zebroid is a zebra with any other equine animal. A ligur is a male lion with a lady tiger. A mule is a jack donkey with a female horse. A hinny is a jenny with a male horse. And a grolar bear is a polar bear with a grizzly. Very rare but presumably utterly terrifying.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“Genes never work in isolation, and almost never have just one role.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“Your genome is the totality of your DNA, 3 billion letters of it, and due to the way it comes together – by the mysterious (from a biological point of view) business of sex – it is unique to you. Not only is this genetic fingerprint yours alone, it’s unlike any other of the 107 billion people who have ever lived. That applies even if you are an identical twin, whose genomes begin their existence indistinguishable, but inch away from each other moments after conception. In the”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“life has existed on Earth for about 3.9 billion years. The species Homo sapiens, of which you are a member, emerged a mere 300,000 years ago as far as we know, in pockets in east and north Africa. Writing began about 6,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, somewhere in what we now call the Middle East.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes