Quotes About Geneticists

One of the more obvious differences between modern humans is skin color. We make crude visual distinctions and effectively meaningless categorizations based on average skin tones, such as black or white. The question of race is explored in depth in Chapter 5, and I will explain why geneticists ascribe no scientific value to these broad racial attempts at definitions of peoples.

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.

By tracing paternal ancestry through Y-DNA, geneticists have found that a third of African American men today are directly descended from a white male ancestor who fathered a mulatto child in the slavery era, "most probably from rape or coerced sexuality," in the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of African American studies at Harvard, and presenter of popular television shows on black genealogy.

Geneticists have confirmed that milk-drinking adults are the exception to the norm, identifying a deviant gene on the second chromo-some that causes lactase persistence. (The gene is SNP C/T13910, if you care.)

Icelanders are among the most inbred human beings on earth—geneticists often use them for research.

During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists' understanding of mutations in DNA.

Most recently, the task of assembling the genetic story for specific phenotypic traits has begun. It is still in its early stages, but progress is accelerating nonlinearly. Hence the nervousness that has prevented open discussion of what's going on in the geneticists' parallel universe: the fear that we will discover scary population differences in what I have called cognitive repertoires.

The reptilian race, or Lizzies as we affectionately call them, are an integral part of your ancestral line. . . . Understand that the reptilian energies are creator gods. They are master geneticists

The conventional explanation is that Raphael, Mendel, and Bach were always creative, only their reputation changed with the vagaries of social recognition. But the systems model recognizes the fact that creativity cannot be separated from its recognition. Mendel was not creative during his years of relative obscurity because his experimental findings were not that important until a group of British geneticists, at the end of the nineteenth century, recognized their implications for evolution.