Quotes from Adam Rutherford

We know that some early humans migrated into Asia and Europe within the last quarter of a million years, but their dominion outside of Africa was temporary, and they probably leave no descendants today. Around seventy thousand years ago another group of people drifted away from Africa, and the process of setting down new roots all over this planet began.

Island populations often breed strange and interesting genomes. Because Iceland is so small, with a precisely known chronology of inhabitation to the present day, we have the most comprehensive log of everyone who has ever lived there since the ninth century. There have only been thirty-five generations of Icelanders. Since the end of the era of settlement, there's been very little immigration into Iceland of note.

Warren Buffett puts it all rather well: "What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.

Most cultures agree that killing other people is forbidden, and it is even enshrined in the Abrahamic commandments, though it seems this is interpreted as more of a guideline than a rule, given the enthusiasm with which the disciples of Christ and Muhammad have engaged with the snuffing out of other people's light.

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.

However, if your understanding of a science extends only to the point where your political preconceptions are supported, then you are an ideologue, not a scientist.

The press loves a heretic, especially one who can set fire to things and then walk away to look for the next pile of kindling. It is more problematic when the arsonist is in the heart of government, but is ill informed and, worse, spellbound by a science that is barely understood by experts, let alone tourists.

The mammals—hairy creatures that produce milk to nurture their young—are a small group of organisms on Earth, with only around 6,000 types known, one-fifth of which are different styles of bat.

A thousand years ago, we Europeans share all of our ancestry. Triple that time and we share all our ancestry with everyone on Earth.

We have good evidence that Homo erectus, that highly successful human who walked all over the Earth from 1.9 million years ago until around 140,000 years ago, was a fire user in some capacity. The dates when they first utilised fire remain disputed.

everyone alive of European descent would be able to select a line that would cross everyone else's around the time of Richard II.

scientific research, one that underwrites every single aspect of the life sciences. "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution

In contrast, the governments of the US, Sweden, Nazi Germany, and other countries had active eugenics policies that resulted in the forced sterilizations and deaths of millions.

This is a seam that will run throughout this book, confronting and dispelling the culturally ubiquitous idea that genes are fate, and a certain type of any one gene will determine exactly what an individual is like. That this is a fallacy is universally known among geneticists, yet it is still an idea that carries a lot of cultural significance, fueled frequently by the media and an ultra-simplistic understanding of the absurd complexities of human biology.

We are the only animal that cooks.

We often deploy the clumsy ideas of nature and nurture to describe what is innate in us, and what is extrinsic. What this really means is: genetics (that is, what is encoded in DNA), and everything else in the universe. Your genome is a script, etched into the kernel at the center of your cells, but the film of your life is played out in the countless forces that determine how that script is performed. Nature was never versus nurture; it is and always was via.

you have the potential to be a Formula 1 champion. It is easier to measure something than to understand what it is you are measuring.

Repository for Germinal Choice in Escondido, California

Nineteen teeth from twelve sixth-century plague pits in Aschheim near Munich provided the source of the Code of Justinian. In among the ancient human DNA are the remnants of other species that loiter around our bodies. A 2013 study ground out DNA from those teeth and found without doubt the same Yersinia pestis we see today. This had settled a long running debate about whether that great plague was in fact bubonic.

The stigma of a genetic predisposition to alcoholism remains among Native Americans to this day, despite the fact that it is a claim not rooted in fact.

No matter the languages we speak or the colour 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.

There are plenty of scientific theories why they do this, none of which can be summarized as "because they can," disappointingly.

have fallen into the tempting trap of mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

We look to statistics for reassurance in these types of case. Here is one: 100 percent of mass shootings have been enabled by access to guns. I can guarantee that even if there were a genotype shared by the mass shooters, which there will not be, none of the killings would have happened if they didn't have guns.