Quotes from Adam Rutherford

As for its original meaning in the evolution of us, I no longer know if it is true. As we have seen, in technology, in sex, in fashion, we are different from other animals. But the implication that the differences between us and them are determined by our relative position on a line is questionable.

Biologists sometimes get physics envy, because every time we find out one of our big rules – universal genetics, evolution by natural selection – things look more complex within them as soon as we begin to look.

Something on the order of 107 billion modern humans have existed, though this number depends on when exactly you start counting. All of them—of us—are close cousins, because our species has a single African origin.

Intelligence: Born Smart, Born Equal, Born Different

This is an absence of evidence, which we scientists like to remind people is not the same as evidence of absence.

We can't agree definitively on what happened in the last decade. Newspapers record stories with biases firmly in place.

from a time when there were at least four human species on Earth right up to the kings of Europe into the eighteenth century.

most recent common ancestor of everyone alive today on Earth lived only around 3,400 years ago.

there is no contemporary evidence even for the existence of Jesus Christ, arguably the most influential man in history. Most of our tales about his life were written in the decades after his death by people who had never met him.

Our findings suggest a remarkable proposition: no matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

But we don't have more protein-coding genes than a chimpanzee. In fact, we have fewer genes than a roundworm. Or a banana.

Are we still evolving?' is a question that geneticists get asked a lot. Here is the answer: yes.

As long as humans keep having sex and that sex results in more humans, then we are evolving. We can avoid these evolutionary changes no more easily than we can change the weather.

Imagine if we could access 100 percent" is a surfeit-of-gravitas line spoken by a typically august Morgan Freeman in the 2014 film. Scarlett Johansson is the titular protagonist who pharmacologically gains access to the other 90 percent, and acquires telepathy, telekinesis, the ability to somehow encounter her Australopithecine namesake, and even witness the Big Bang. It's dumb-as-bricks scientifically illiterate hooey, and highly recommended for that precise reason.

what DNA analysis revealed more categorically than anything else was that we had sex with them, repeatedly, probably as soon as these two peoples met, and every time afterward.

I do have brown eyes, something that I had established a few years ago, with the less exciting technology of a mirror. Nevertheless, it is nice to have it confirmed at a molecular biological level. The

The Neanderthals were a proto-species, an embryonic light that flickered in evolutionary time, but was not strong enough to stand across epochs.

There's a cave in this hinterland of Siberia, called Denisova, named after an eighteenth-century eremite called Denis who lived there.

Whichever way speech and language emerged in humans, it was a transition, with all those necessary but not sufficient pieces being nudged in one way or the other, by chance, by selection. The fact that it was a transition, not a revolution, means it took time.

Homo sapiens comes into being from 300,000 years ago, according to specimens from Morocco and east Africa, and by 100,000 years ago we have bodies pretty much the same as we do today.

It was the co-evolution of minds, brains and hands that drove us to use sticks, knap stones, refine those flakes, and eventually, after long periods of stasis, develop our technological prowess so that we could carve statues, and musical instruments, and weapons that made resources ever-more available. Despite a few animals having similarly complex brains, none has come close to our tool skills for many millions of years.

But the real kicker came with the revelation that Denisovan DNA was alive and well in contemporary Melanesians—the indigenous people of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and a scattering of islands off the northeast coast of Australia.

A similar result from Bristol scientists using 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. Again, something was apparently being acquired and passed on.

The revolution was not televised; it was livestreamed.