Quotes from Adam Rutherford

The nineteenth-century abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker said that the moral arc of the world tends towards justice

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.

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

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

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Duplication and transfer from other genetic sources are examples of nature's ability to co-opt existing tools: evolution the tinkerer. Evolution also creates from scratch. We call these de novo mutations, and they arise when a seemingly nonsensical run of DNA mutates and changes into a readable sentence.

For a century the Neanderthal people have worn a stigma of hunched brutish grunting cavemen. Facial reconstructions of their skulls show them to look not exactly like us, and not exactly pretty. But beauty is a very subjective matter, and just because you don't fancy them doesn't mean that your ancestors didn't. They definitely had sex with them.

This is a strange conundrum that betrays our difficulties with classifying life, and our adherence to a system that was designed to show the perfection of divine creation, organisms static in time and set in stone as they stand before us. Darwin's great idea ruined that ideal, because he recognized that life passes through time, and changes continually. The only life forms that don't change are dead ones.

The seven billion of us alive today are, according to all the evidence available to us, the last remaining group of human great apes from a set of at least four that existed 50,000 years ago.

But perhaps exoneration via the complex and poorly understood root of genetics is missing the broader point that maybe we shouldn't abuse children.

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.

We only have to go back a few dozen centuries to see that most of the 7 billion of us alive today are descended from a tiny handful of people, the population of a village.

For the sake of perspective, 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 the east and north of Africa. Writing began about 6,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, somewhere in what we now call the Middle East.

But they also became us, and we will find them in the old bones and inside our own cells. We carry the past with us. There was no beginning, and there are no missing links, just the ebb and flow and ebb again of living through epochs. Those ancient people never went extinct—we just merged.

DNA also reveals behavior. Culture can become embedded in our cells just as it gets buried in the floors of caves, bogs, and dwellings.

There are no spaces in genes, but cells still understand the three-letter structure. De novo genes arise when a clump of letters is converted into a meaningful sentence by chance, and thus suddenly becomes understandable by the mechanics of the cell, and translated into a protein. The protein that results is utilised in some way. If it is used, then the organism that has acquired this new gene will pass it on.

the Galtons were Quakers and gunsmiths, which might seem an unlikely combination given that religion's commitment to nonviolence. Francis was born to Samuel Galton and Frances Darwin in 1822

By the time of the agricultural revolution, we see multiplication and expansion of genes that encode salivary amylase, an enzyme in your spittle that initiates the digestion of complex molecules. Some people have eighteen copies of it, but chimpanzees only have two.

The second problem is more general: DNA is not unique to any one tribe.

One of the more obvious differences between modern humans is skin color. We make crude visual distinctions and effectively meaningless categorizations based on average skin tones, such as black or white. The question of race is explored in depth in Chapter 5, and I will explain why geneticists ascribe no scientific value to these broad racial attempts at definitions of peoples.

All life is set for extinction over a long enough timescale; more than 97 percent of species that have ever existed are already gone.

But the idea that tribal status is encoded in DNA is both simplistic and wrong.

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

Flight is a good trick, and has evolved repeatedly in distantly related creatures, but it has also evolved many times over within the same groups of creatures.