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)
everyone's past becomes muddled sooner or later.
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.
Life is transition: the only things that are truly static are already dead.
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.
palaeoanthropologist's
We are genus: Homo; species: sapiens – Homo sapiens: the wise man. That's the short version.
two species are defined as distinct when they are incapable of producing fertile offspring together. Zebroids, ligers, mules, hinnies, grolar bears5
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.
The last common ancestor of us and them is thought to have existed around 600,000 years before today.
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.
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.
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.
Those ancient people never went extinct – we just merged.
If these mutations do not cause serious problems or death, then they can be the source of variation, which is the fuel for evolution.
Eight thousand years ago there were probably about 5 million people on Earth, the current population of Norway.
borborygmus, which is a technical word for a rumbly tummy.
Alas, a fiction can fly around the world before the truth has managed to pick the sleep from its eyes in the morning.
Such is the nature of human variation: we're very variable.
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.
The Black Death had made its way from mainland Europe to Britain, where by 1350 it had cut through a third of the population,
We are all special, which also means that none of us is. This is merely a numbers game.
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.
You can be, and in fact are, descended from the same individual many times over.
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.
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.
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.
Richard III is now the oldest person to be unequivocally identified in death.
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.
Orchids are named after the shape of their roots,13 which resemble the male gonads, called orchis in Greek.
The Middle English name for orchid is bollockwort. This deserves to be reintroduced to polite contemporary society.
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.
The great irony is this: the science of genetics was founded specifically on the study of racial inequality, by a racist.
Mark Twain wrote in 1869 that 'travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.'
From 1907 when Indiana passed the first mandate, until 1963, forced sterilization was legally administered in thirty-one states,
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.
We are naturally plagued by the tyranny of a discontinuous mind, as Richard Dawkins so eloquently said.
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.
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.
'For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable, and wrong.' H.L. Mencken
In fact, we have fewer genes than a roundworm. Or a banana.
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.
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.
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.
each disease is a unique interplay between the cause(s) and the patient.
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.
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.
and have fallen into the tempting trap of mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.
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.
Are we slaves or masters of our genes? We are neither, and it's a dumb, simplistic question.
the biology that is revealed by genetics are not causes, or triggers, or foundations. They are potential factors: probabilities.
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.
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.
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.
Cats have many more rods and so see in the dark much better than us, but not colour.
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;
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.
Five thousand years ago there were 5 million or so of us. By 2025 we estimate a global population of 9 billion.
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.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge … says Darwin in The Descent of Man,
over a long enough period, all species become something else living, or become dead. This is the continuous fact of life on Earth.
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,
An unchanging species is already extinct.
We're unique in our DNA, but it was drawn from millions of past lives.
a gene is a sequence of DNA that encodes a working protein.