Quotes from Adam Rutherford

Agriculture is different. It is the industrial process of symbiotic cultivation, in the sense of being systematic worked labour in order to generate a grown product. The goats we milked 7,000 years ago were being shaped by domestication, and now they are what we made them.

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.

Of all the attempts over the centuries to place humans in distinct races, none succeeds.

Not only were we diverse in our skin color long before the dispersal from Africa, we were diverse in our skin color before we were our own species.

DNA subtly changes over time via the genetic equivalents of typos—spelling mistakes which slip through due to inaccurate copyediting by the proteins that check the code after it has been replicated.

What we can also say with an arsenal of scientific ammunition is that though skin color is the first and most obvious way we see humans, it's a superficial route to an understanding of human variation, and a very bad way to classify people.

any action predicated solely on DNA sequence seems to me to be a high-risk endeavor, prone to specious failure.

sexual violence and rape in our oldest texts. These include the rape of Hera, Antiope, Europa and Leda, all by Zeus; Persephone by Hades; Odysseus by Calypso;

Every evolutionary pathway is unique, and while all living beings are related, how each one came to be is a different story, with different pressures driving selection, and random changes in DNA providing the template from which variation, selection and evolutionary change can occur. Evolution is blind, mutation is random, selection is not.

100 percent of mass shootings have been enabled by access to guns.

We have no room for the mystical in science

All abilities are evolved, which doesn't mean that they all have common roots.

was not an apple that gave us this knowledge – apples are a product of our own agricultural ingenuity. It was how we lived our lives.

genetic genealogy companies will sell you kits that claim to grant you membership to historical peoples, albeit ill-defined, highly romanticized versions of ancient Europeans. This type of genetic astrology, though unscientific and distasteful to my palate, is really just a bit of meaningless fantasy; its real damage is that it undermines scientific literacy in the general public.

Darwin, with typical prescience, suspected that this might be the case: Man alone is capable of progressive improvement. That he is capable of incomparably greater and more rapid improvement than is any other animal, admits of no dispute; and this is mainly due to his power of speaking and handing down his acquired knowledge.

statistician David Spiegelhalter has puzzled on the numbers that describe our sexual lives, and estimates that something like 900,000,000 acts of heterosexual intercourse take place per year in Britain alone, or roughly 100,000 per hour. If we extrapolate that to the seven billion humans alive, it works out at around 166,667 every minute.

Yes, the presentations and formal lectures at scientific meetings can be dreadfully important, but – and this is a trade secret – they can be breathtakingly boring. Sometimes

Forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories . . . they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Irish, Welsh and Scots like to claim Celtic genetic genealogy, despite the fact that 'Celtic' isn't a coherent ancestral population, and cultural similarities betray the fact that according to the latest genetic data, those three groupings are frequently more similar to mainland English people than they are to each other.

But in the bar, the real science gets scrutinized and the best ideas assembled. Lifelong collaborations and friendships are made, bitter squabbles and permanent enmities are forged.

Why let the facts get in the way of a good story? Especially when it's got a sexy headline.

Creationists (and others unencumbered by facts) cite epigenetics to assert that Darwin was wrong, and that these transgenerational epigenetic studies show Lamarckian evolution. They don't, as the changes are not perpetual and do not change the DNA sequence itself, on which natural selection acts. Even

In the human genome, in total, there are around 3 billion individual letters of DNA. Of the analogies of scale, the one that gets trotted out most frequently is that this is equivalent to some twenty standard-issue phone books, though when I use that in lectures these days most school kids have never seen a phone book.

Nobodies from the past are being elevated to some of the most important people who ever lived.