Goodness me, this was a good book! Right from the start, Rutherford states that the book won't be littered with references to research papers throughout and the book reads very much like Rutherford is quite literally telling me a story (I should add that references are added in the appendix of the book if you want to validate and have further reading on the subject of DNA).

I always feel like when I read non-fiction I'm supposed to be a little smarter once I've finished, and somehow retain my newly acquired knowledge so I can wax lyrical later on in the pub in years to come…

The subject of this book is (as the title suggest) genes, DNA and how it all works. The book is fascinating, and although I'm certain that I'm zero percent smarter now (sadly my own failing!), Rutherford's book was littered with fascinating stories from both recent and distant history - which have so far stuck in my head.

I got wind of this book via my own genealogy research, and being able to find every step in my ancestry to William The Conqueror, I posted a tweet and eventually saw a reply from Adam Rutherford explaining "that's cool that you can demonstrate it with genealogy, but it’s literally true for all British people too. Edward 3 is the direct ancestor of every British person".

That snippet reply alone piqued my interest in reading this book, and damn glad I did - I think I highlighted nearly two pages worth of kindle notes, partly to help me remember and partly because there was some superb stuff in there, including:

borborygmus, which is a technical word for a rumbly tummy.

Rutherford's writing and storytelling is entertaining, informative and even regularly funny.

64 Highlight(s)

Location 100

everyone's past becomes muddled sooner or later.

Location 223

there are people in your family from whom you have inherited no genes at all, and who therefore have no meaningful genetic link to you, even though in a genealogical sense you are most definitely descended from them.

Location 247

Life is transition: the only things that are truly static are already dead.

Location 315

We are just another animal, but we're the only one evolved to have scrutinized our own existence, to look in the mirror and really squint at it.

Location 317

palaeoanthropologist's

Location 347

We are genus: Homo; species: sapiens – Homo sapiens: the wise man. That's the short version.

Location 359

two species are defined as distinct when they are incapable of producing fertile offspring together. Zebroids, ligers, mules, hinnies, grolar bears5

Location 499

Almost all – more than 97 per cent – of your DNA is carried in the twenty-two pairs of autosomes and the X, and all this genetic information is inherited from both parents in a roughly equal manner.

Location 541

The last common ancestor of us and them is thought to have existed around 600,000 years before today.

Location 728

Because DNA tends to be inherited in chunks, we can learn how useful bits of genome are by the size of chunks that are shared.

Location 779

It wasn't us, and it wasn't Neanderthal. No other species in the genus Homo was known to exist at that time in Europe or Asia, and it was not a sequence akin to our primate cousins, chimps, or bonobos. It – she, we would soon discover – was a new type of human.

Location 876

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.

Location 885

Those ancient people never went extinct – we just merged.

Location 938

If these mutations do not cause serious problems or death, then they can be the source of variation, which is the fuel for evolution.

Location 1050

Eight thousand years ago there were probably about 5 million people on Earth, the current population of Norway.

Location 1112

borborygmus, which is a technical word for a rumbly tummy.

Location 1311

Alas, a fiction can fly around the world before the truth has managed to pick the sleep from its eyes in the morning.

Location 1352

Such is the nature of human variation: we're very variable.

Location 1644

but by this stage you're too feeble to do anything much. You are riddled with the bubonic plague, and a fortnight after that hungry flea puked Yersinia pestis into your bloodstream, you're dead.

Location 1684

The Black Death had made its way from mainland Europe to Britain, where by 1350 it had cut through a third of the population,

Location 1888

We are all special, which also means that none of us is. This is merely a numbers game.

Location 1892

What this means is that pedigrees begin to fold in on themselves a few generations back, and become less arboreal, and more a mesh or web-like.

Location 1893

You can be, and in fact are, descended from the same individual many times over.

Location 1908

if we could document the total family tree of everyone alive back through 600 years, among the impenetrable mess, everyone European alive would be able to select a line that would cross everyone else's around the time of Richard II.

Location 1911

One fifth of people alive a millennium ago in Europe are the ancestors of no one alive today. Their lines of descent petered out at some point, when they or one of their progeny did not leave any of their own. Conversely, the remaining 80 per cent are the ancestor of everyone living today. All lines of ancestry coalesce on every individual in the tenth century.

Location 2060

Among a battery of questionable assertions, we were told on the programme by Jim Wilson – academic geneticist and co-founder of BritainsDNA – that this particular type of DNA is 2,000 years old, which is a bit puzzling given that the Vikings didn't exist 2,000 years ago.

Location 2262

Richard III is now the oldest person to be unequivocally identified in death.

Location 2404

Six generations should contain 62 different people, as does mine, and our own queen's today. Charles II's has 32. Eight generations should contain 254 different people. Charles II's has 82.

Location 2490

Orchids are named after the shape of their roots,13 which resemble the male gonads, called orchis in Greek.

Location 2649

The Middle English name for orchid is bollockwort. This deserves to be reintroduced to polite contemporary society.

Location 2720

there are no essential genetic elements for any particular group of people who might be identified as a 'race'. As far as genetics is concerned, race does not exist.

Location 2727

The great irony is this: the science of genetics was founded specifically on the study of racial inequality, by a racist.

Location 2804

Mark Twain wrote in 1869 that 'travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.'

Location 2869

From 1907 when Indiana passed the first mandate, until 1963, forced sterilization was legally administered in thirty-one states,

Location 3133

We know that the emergence of the pale skin we associate with Europe, and particularly northern Europe, only emerged in the last few thousand years, just as the genes for processing milk did.

Location 3202

We are naturally plagued by the tyranny of a discontinuous mind, as Richard Dawkins so eloquently said.

Location 3293

Mobility of human species and our excellence at sex have placed the common origin of all humans alive at only 3,400 years ago, or thereabouts.

Location 3340

Francis Galton's inclination towards being a data junkie led him to instigate a science that he hoped would affirm his prejudices. The beautiful irony is that it did precisely the opposite.

Location 3420

'For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable, and wrong.' H.L. Mencken

Location 3517

In fact, we have fewer genes than a roundworm. Or a banana.

Location 3748

It is true that medicine has been revolutionized in the years following the HGP. We understand more about the causes of diseases than at any time in history.

Location 3854

Heritability is a measure of how much of the differences we see in a population can be accounted for by genetics, and how much is determined by the environment.

Location 3884

Genes do not determine the outcome of almost all human biology and psychology. Dozens or hundreds of genes can be involved, each with small cumulative effects, and all mitigated by the world in which we live.

Location 3887

each disease is a unique interplay between the cause(s) and the patient.

Location 3899

We were so desperate to find simple rules to explain ourselves. The idea was that a gene would encode a trait, or a disease, and we could track these through families, through the generations and through history. It's an idea that pre-dates genetics by centuries.

Location 3956

we were taught how blue eyes are a recessive allele, and brown is the dominant version. Therefore, if you have one of each, you would have brown eyes. If you had two blues you have blue eyes. And if you have you two browns, then you have brown eyes.

Location 3995

and have fallen into the tempting trap of mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

Location 4015

I believe that the way forward in human genetics is to sequence everyone in full, from birth. We would then enter a realm of data security and privacy issues that are yet to be fully realized, and these need to be tackled in society with the widest possible consultation.

Location 4193

Are we slaves or masters of our genes? We are neither, and it's a dumb, simplistic question.

Location 4285

the biology that is revealed by genetics are not causes, or triggers, or foundations. They are potential factors: probabilities.

Location 4393

words like 'quantum', which offers up some magical scienceyness, none more so than in 'quantum healing' – an unfathomable extension of reiki, which, let's face it, is a load of old cobblers already.

Location 4411

This result was a first in humans, that showed that what happens to a mother can affect not only her children, but her grandchildren too.

Location 4415

a huge dataset called the Avon Longitudinal Study – the gold standard of transgenerational research – showed that men who smoked before puberty sired fatter sons than those who smoked after.

Location 4553

Cats have many more rods and so see in the dark much better than us, but not colour.

Location 4558

the Medium and Long are on the X. This is why men are more prone to colour blindness than women: a faulty opsin on one X can be compensated for by a woman's second;

Location 4561

Some women might be tetrachromatic. They, through another random chance duplication, have acquired a fourth opsin on one of their X chromosomes. Around one in eight women are estimated to have this extra gene variant, but whether that bestows tetrachromacy is not yet known.

Location 4603

Five thousand years ago there were 5 million or so of us. By 2025 we estimate a global population of 9 billion.

Location 4652

In the nineteenth century, women in the UK averaged 5.5 children, but by the end of the First World War it was down to 2.4.

Location 4710

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge … says Darwin in The Descent of Man,

Location 4747

over a long enough period, all species become something else living, or become dead. This is the continuous fact of life on Earth.

Location 4749

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 maths, religion and philosophy. In science we simply lean in towards truth, every step inching us closer to the way things actually are,

Location 4761

An unchanging species is already extinct.

Location 4809

We're unique in our DNA, but it was drawn from millions of past lives.

Location 4857

a gene is a sequence of DNA that encodes a working protein.