Quotes from Adam Rutherford

A zebroid is a zebra with any other equine animal. A ligur is a male lion with a lady tiger. A mule is a jack donkey with a female horse. A hinny is a jenny with a male horse. And a grolar bear is a polar bear with a grizzly. Very rare but presumably utterly terrifying.

Humans are both horny and mobile.

Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward." Job 5:7

All scientists need to be wrong as often as they can be, for that is the place from which we discover what is correct, and inch ever closer to the truth.

Go back to where you come from," someone told me on Twitter last year, and I did indeed drive up the highway to Ipswich to visit my folks for the weekend.

For our purposes, if we are to look at the evolution that led to where we are now, instead of the nice neat tree, I think it could reasonably be described as one big million-year clusterfuck. Whenever humans met - Sapiens, Neanderthal, Denisovans - they had sex. What a time to be alive.

The question of our relationship with Neanderthals has been refined with genetics, in terms of our shared ancestors; our lineage moved away from theirs around half a million years ago. But 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.

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches … Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.' 'Chapter 14: Recapitulation and Conclusion' in The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, 1859

There's no trace of genetic fair skin between those two dates.

crunching. The amount of introgression from Neanderthals is proportionally lower on the modern X than on the rest of the chromosomes. X chromosomes are only passed on by males half of the time because we also have a Y, but all of the time by women, who have two Xs. The observation that there is less Neanderthal DNA on our Xs implies that the first encounters we had with them that resulted in procreation were male Neanderthals with female Homo sapiens.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge . . . says Darwin in The Descent of Man, his study of the evolution of humans from our hairier ancestors.

from the point of view of a geneticist, race does not exist. It has no useful scientific value.

Despite our differences, all humans are remarkably close relatives, and our family tree is pollarded, and tortuous, and not in the slightest bit like a tree. But we are the fruit thereof.

Some researchers suppose that the presence of tools represents the boundary between the genus Homo and what came before, meaning that humans are actually defined by tool use.

That, of course, does not mean the racism doesn't exist.

Genes are the units of inheritance, the things that are selected by nature to be carried into the future. Nature sees the physical manifestation of a gene—the phenotype—and as a result of that trait enhancing survival, the DNA underwriting it succeeds, and is passed on down the generations. Genes are the templates on which our lives are built.

life has existed on Earth for about 3.9 billion years. The species Homo sapiens, of which you are a member, emerged a mere 300,000 years ago as far as we know, in pockets in east and north Africa. Writing began about 6,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, somewhere in what we now call the Middle East.

In a hole in the ground, a man lay extremely dead.

Every scientist knows that the most productive conversations happen in the bar.

Biology is the study of what lives and therefore what dies. It's messy—wonderfully, frustratingly so—and imprecise and defies definitions.

Thirteen thousand nucleotides upstream of the beginning of the lactase gene is a region that controls its activity, and a mutation in that distant control center accounts for the vast majority of milk drinkers.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time." Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

In fact, sexual acts between members of the same sex abound in nature, in thousands of animals, and, for example, may well dominate male giraffe sexual encounters.

Just as important as what genetics can tell us is what it can't.