Quotes from Adam Rutherford

Many people know of the maxim said by the biologist François Jacob describing natural selection as a tinkerer. I like to think of the words of the US president Teddy Roosevelt: "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

On the beautiful Norfolk coast, there's Happisburgh (pronounced Hays-bruh), a small village with a lighthouse, a church, a superb pub, and not much else, apart from almost a million years of human occupation.

males and females can be made. In the second broad category of being a sexual organism are the species that have dozens of sexes, possibly thousands.

In December 2016, in one of his last acts in office, President Barack Obama signed legislation that allowed Kennewick Man to be reburied as a Native American.

These gene maps powerfully suggest that that the Beringian Standstill hypothesis is correct: All Native Americans, north and south, have versions of genes relating to diet that are suited to their current environments, but born of an ancient population subject to local adaptation in the frozen north, thousands of years ago.

According to traditional paleoanthropology based on bones, by the time Homo sapiens reached Europe, probably around 60,000 years ago, the Neanderthals were already there and well established, albeit in small communities.

I will show you that despite what you might have read, genetics won't tell you how smart your kids will be, or what sports they should play, or what gender person they might fancy, or how they will die, or why some people commit acts of heinous violence and murder. Just as important as what genetics can tell us is what it can't.

Something on the order of 107 billion modern humans have existed, though this number depends on when exactly you start counting.

Pedigree is a word derived from the middle French phrase pied de grue—the crane's foot—as the digits and hallux spread from a single joint at the bottom of the tibia, roughly equivalent to our ankle. This branching describes one or a few generations of a family tree

Genes never work in isolation, and almost never have just one role.

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.

The key finding was that the sequences of DNA generated implied that the human that led to us diverged from those who led to the Neanderthals around 500,000 years ago.

Iceland straddles a rip in the earth's mantle, and the two plates riven through the land are slowly pulling it apart, at the speed of fingernail growth. There

Nevertheless, every Nazi has Jewish ancestors. Every White supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, Chinese, American Indian, and Aboriginal Australian ancestors, as does everyone else, and not just in the sense that humankind is an African species in deep prehistory, but at a minimum from classical times, and probably much more recently. Racial purity is a pure fantasy.

We are all Rumsfeldian, if we are doing science right.

extremely complicated. But they are recorded in our genes. The aim of this book is to anatomize and lay out precisely what our DNA can and can't tell us about the concept of race.

none more so than pigmentation. Racism has many definitions; a simple version is that racism is a prejudice concerning ancestral descent that can result in discriminatory action.

It is far easier to sell the case for occupation and enslavement if you are persuaded that the indigenous people are different, have different origins, and are qualitatively inferior to colonists.

Racism is hateful bullying, and a means of reinforcing self-identity at the expense of others:

Every one of these ideas though must be considered in the cultural context and time in which it was authored. All are by European men being exposed to the peoples of the world as a result of expanded trade routes, colonialization, and empire building, and in many cases the conquering and enslavement of the people they encountered. The invention of race occurs in an era of exploration, exploitation, and plunder, an era when the othering of people from colonies extended to actual human zoos.

Doubt is the cornerstone of science. It gives you a sure footing from which to build an argument based on data.

The Arab," for comparison, he concludes, "is little more than an eater up of other men's produce; he is a destroyer rather than a creator, and he is unprolific"). Though wince-inducing now, these sorts of views were not necessarily normal and not necessarily uncontroversial then, and we shouldn't assume that these were universal British Victorian values.

The greatest achievement of the Human Genome Project was working out exactly how little we knew— known unknowns. Once you know what you need to know, the future is laid out in front of you. And so, the map was sketched, and the landscape was set out— where to explore, and what we might be hunting for.

according to the genetics, there wasn't a point where a group of genetically similar people spread into the extremities of the British Isles and settled into a culture that we now call Celtic. That word is a modern invention of a presumed people that isn't reflected in Britain's DNA.