Quotes from Christine Kenneally

If you built a time machine and traveled back four hundred years and, let's say for the sake of argument, found yourself in a romance with one of your sixteenth-grade grandmothers, the good news is that you can feel fine about having children together. However morally bizarre that might be, it would not be genetically problematic.

As of 2014 a small handful of well-known companies—Family Tree DNA, 23andMe, and AncestryDNA.com, as well as National Geographic's Genographic Project—and services offer a selection of DNA tests and genealogical connections to the general public.

not put in place, one wonders how insurance and pharmaceutical companies will treat our grandchildren if they have genetic information about them, perhaps even before they are even conceived. Insurance

Here is where it becomes clear that this kind of fine-grained genetic history is the flip side of the family-history coin. Although genealogy is not widely valued in academia, it meshes perfectly with, and helps explain, social history. These small stories about individual lives reveal the way that individual choices shape the biology and the history of whole populations.

I]t is almost impossible to talk about space without gesturing. Gesture is spontaneous, and is integral to individual expression as it is to communication. Even though you probably won't gesture as much if you are talking on the phone, you will still wave your arms about. Blind people gesture when they speak in the same way that seeing people do.

Some parts of the genome with a high frequency of Neanderthal variants shape hair and skin color and likely made the first Eurasians lighter-skinned than their African ancestors.

You may discover that a certain sequence of letters in your autosomal DNA is typically found in someone with Finnish heritage or Korean ancestry. Only a few years ago the world of science was turned upside down when it was discovered that in ancient times two nonhuman species contributed to the human genome.

At the same time that Lahn's results were published, another team of scientists based at the University of California, San Diego, announced the discovery of a positively selected gene called SIGLEC11 that is expressed in brain cells called microglia. Although they can't yet explain the effects of the gene, it is interesting because it is one of the very few found only in humans and not in our ape cousins. This could make it a candidate for explaining some of the differences between us and them.

It is well known that onset of the disease is affected by lifestyle, yet even when the at-risk subjects were given information about their susceptibility, many did not adjust their fat intake or increase exercise or consult medical specialists to minimize their risk.

As a graduate student Nathan Nunn, now a Harvard economist, began to compare different economies in modern Africa, and he found that the countries that lost more people to the slave trade were also the poorest countries today. How

This is because our personal genetic tree is not equivalent to our genealogical tree, which is to say that not every one of our direct ancestors has contributed to our genome.

In our evolutionary history some individuals must have been born with a greater inclination and ability to collaborate than our common ancestor with chimpanzees. These individuals were more successful and bred more offspring with those characteristics [...]. What we have evolved into now is a species for whom an experience means little if it's not shared.

While all living things affect the evolution of other living things simply by virtue of trying to stay alive, humans interact with the biological evolution of other species in a much more complex and powerful fashion because of one ability: language. Nothing occurs on the human scale without language. No language means no agriculture, no animal farming, no science.

At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.

Today there are about six thousand languages in the world, and half of the world's population speaks only ten of them. English is the single most dominant of these ten.

Language is the real information highway, the first virtual world. Language is the worldwide web, and everyone is logged on.

Most curious is the way that Y/surname patterns differ between countries. In Britain, on average, a man who has the same surname as another is significantly more likely to have a similar Y chromosome, and therefore a common ancestor, than he would with someone of a different surname. But there's a twist: The Y similarity depends on the frequency of the surname within the population. If you are a Smith, for example, the rule does not apply.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. —Golda Meir

The world loses one of its six thousand languages every two weeks, and children have stopped learning half of the languages currently spoken in the world. It's been argued that languages are under greater threat than any endangered bird or mammal.

If every chunk of DNA were halved with every generation, the result would be a rather neat picture of proportionately shrinking segments that matched an expanding fan of cousins. But if the cut and shuffle of DNA down through the generations is not a smooth, even process and relatively large chunks of DNA may be passed on through generations more or less unchanged, it has some interesting implications for what DNA can tell us about the past.

Whether or not it's moral to let language extinction occur, it is the case that languages are irreplaceable records of the development of human societies and alternate windows into the human mind. When a language dies, we lose the knowledge that was encoded in it. Though we assume that when knowledge is lost, it has been superseded by a superior version, a dead language, with all its unique ways of carving up the world, is as irreplaceable as the dodo or the Tyrannosaurus rex.

But there is no agency in evolution; it is inadvertent. We survived, modified, and multiplied, just like any animal alive today, and out of the wildly dodgem course we took, language arose.

once spoke about the genetics of ancestry with a Holocaust historian who had hunted some of the last surviving Nazis in the 1990s. When I told him that little letters in our genetic code might testify to the ethnicity of our parents and grandparents, he said, "The Nazis would have loved this." They would certainly have seized upon the idea, but in the end the full picture would have let them down just as badly as all the other dubious measures of race they tried to develop.

Vonnegut exposes the assumption that if we do change biologically, we typically think we will end up smarter in the terms in which we consider ourselves smart today. But to survive means only that we'll be smart in the context of the environment we find ourselves in. If we continue to exist, we will by definition be smarter than the versions of us that did not survive, but that intelligence won't necessarily be comparable to what we have today.