A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes by Adam Rutherford PhD (PDF)

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National Book Critics Circle Award—2017 Nonfiction Finalist “Nothing less than a tour de force—a heady amalgam of science, history, a little bit of anthropology and plenty of nuanced, captivating storytelling.”—The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice A National Geographic Best Book of 2017 In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species—births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. But those stories have always been locked away—until now. Who are our ancestors? Where did they come from? Geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has blown the lid off what we thought we knew. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely rewriting the human story—from 100,000 years ago to the present.

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Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐There is no gene for evil. Black people have no genetic predisposition to excel at sports. Tay-Sachs is not a Jewish disease. Native Americans are not genetically predisposed to alcoholism. And, of course, there is no such thing as a “race” in genetics. These are a few of the many axes Adam Rutherford grinds in his ambitious new book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes.Rutherford’s book consists of two parts. Part One, “How We Came to Be,” lives up to the title for the most part. He outlines the emergence of Homo sapiens as the sole survivor of several human species. (All members of the genus Homo are human. This includes Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus, and an as yet unknown number of other species.) Using the latest findings from genetic research, the author traces the movements of various human populations over 200,000 years since the first anatomically modern human walked the Earth. Rutherford emphasizes that the patterns of migration were far more complex than earlier studies have led us to believe—and interbreeding among human species far more extensive.In Part Two, “Who We Are Now,” Rutherford departs from the promise of the title to survey the findings of genetic research about some of the many popular misconceptions about race and genetics. Here are a few highlights:Are African-Americans uniquely well-suited to play basketball? Not so, he writes. “The Dutch are the tallest people on average on Earth, and I have little doubt that if there were similar numbers of Dutch people as there are Americans, and basketball were as culturally important and ubiquitous, then they would produce teams as good as the LA Lakers.”Do some people commit awful crimes because their genes program them to do so? “No one will ever find a gene for ‘evil,’ or for beauty, or for musical genius, or for scientific genius, because they don’t exist. DNA is not destiny.”What about that “Jewish disease” Tay-Sachs? “Tay-Sachs . . . is seen at roughly the same frequency in Cajuns in Louisiana, and French Canadians in Quebec. There is no such thing as a Jewish disease, because Jews are not a genetically distinct group of people.”What about race? The visible differences between, say, East Asians and Africans suggest that races are real, don’t they? Well, no. Not at all. As Rutherford makes clear, “certain genetic groupings do roughly correspond to geography. But not exclusively, and not essentially.” There is, in fact, no such thing as “race” in genetics. “Eighty-five percent of human variation, according to the genetic differences in blood groups,” Rutherford writes, “was seen in the same racial groups. Of the remaining 15 percent, only 8 percent accounted for differences between one racial group and another.” In other words, those visible differences among the races are trivial from a genetic perspective. The genetic differences among any two Africans from different parts of the continent are almost certainly greater than the differences between either of them and a pale, blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian. This should be obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of genetics, Rutherford suggests. When Homo sapiens began migrating out of Africa and radiating around the world, only small groups left the motherland. The genetic diversity among them was immeasurably smaller than that of the much larger numbers they left behind.The author explains at length that the Human Genome Project did not decode the whole genome. In fact, more than 98 percent of the three billion letters on the genome do not encode for proteins, which is the primary function of genes. These non-coding letters have been given the unfortunate and misleading name of “junk DNA.” Many do have discernible and important functions. But the function of most junk DNA is not understood.Scientists are in the very earliest stages of tapping the power of genetics to address disease. As of now, “the number of diseases that have been eradicated as a result of our knowing the genome? Zero. The number of diseases that have been cured as a result of gene therapy? Zero.” The Human Genome Project was a beginning, not an end. Today, “DNA is used routinely in the diagnosis of dozens of cancers, of heart arrhythmias, in identifying the causes of thousands of diseases too rare to have historically warranted major research projects.” But science today is merely scratching the surface of this potential.Rutherford clearly knows his stuff. But he’s far from infallible. He’s dismissive of linguistic studies that inform our understanding of prehistorical migration patterns. Why? He doesn’t explain. He’s inconsistent about the number of years when Homo sapiens first entered the Americas, citing numbers all the way from 12,000 years to more than 24,000. He refers on numerous occasions to findings from the for-profit companies 23andme and BritainsDNA, both of which provide genetic profiles to individuals for a price. But he fails to mention the National Geographic Genographic Project, which predates them both and now encompasses genetic records from more than 800,000 people. And he first states that individuals from different species can’t mate and produce fertile offspring, then fails to explain how Homo sapiens and Neanderthals together produced so many of the rest of us.British geneticist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford is a former editor of the journal Nature. He hosts the BBC Radio 4 program Inside Science.

⭐Adam Rutherford’s book is well written, very readable, and somewhat entertaining. It’s suitable for folks like me who know little (if anything) about geneticsFor the most part, the author makes challenging subjects relatively easy to understand. He has a strong sense of humor, and he isn’t shy about using rough language.The book does contain a “References and Further Readings” section, but I didn’t find that section particularly informative or helpful.

⭐I bought this book for an anthropology class. If I’m being honest it wasn’t my kind of book but if you’re into this genere it will be a good read.

⭐This is a book about genetics, about what the human genome (the “complete map” first sketched out in 2000 and by 2018 in considerably more detail). “Complete map” is in quotes because as Dr. Rutherford points out there yet remain 99% of the whole genetic compliment whose origin and function we do not yet fully understand. This is the lesson of the whole book. We began to understand what genetics did back in the mid 1800s given Darwin, Galton, and Mendel. By the late 1950s we had connected inheritance to DNA. By the 1980s we had a handle on some genes and their DNA mapping. In 2000 or so we identified all of 20 million human genes, meaning genes that actually result in proteins. Today, in 2018 we understand much more about those parts of our genome (every person’s whole compliment of DNA) that serve other purposes, but there remains much to learn.This book is about all of that. In its first part it is about what modern genetics tells us about the evolution and migration of human beings, both of the modern sort we all are, and some of the various alternative species of Homo that occupied the Earth earlier than modern man and for a while along side them. This is not a technical book. Dr. Rutherford explains everything with little attention to the chemical details. If you have heard of genes and you know they are related to DNA, the author will take you the rest of the way. The main message here is that the path upwards is not a neat tree with clean branches from common ancestors, but more like a bush with various tangled crossovers while a few branches begin to stand out. Shapes of skulls, structures of jaws, types of tools all tell a complicated story. It turns out that adding genetics to the tool kit further complicates it.In its second part, Rutherford focuses on the genetics of human populations of today. Again the story is: we are learning much, the human situation is a lot more complicated than they seemed only a few decades back. Genes whose function we thought pretty clear-cut turn out to be influenced by genes elsewhere all over the human chromosomes. Sometimes the influence isn’t strictly genetic at all. A gene that might normally be turned off (or on) might be turned on (or off) by the conditions of your mother’s womb, what she ate, and what you eat in the first months and years of your life. Of the whole set of human genomics, 98% is common to every man and woman on Earth (indeed we are something like 97% genetically in common with almost every mammal), while the 2% that vary account for all the differences there are in the human population!The book is all about all of these things and more like if and how humans are still evolving. As Dr. Rutherford relates the material of the subject he intersperses it all with stories from his own background, and throws in a sly pun or too in the bargain. Overall the same message. The out workings of genetics are more complicated than we imagined, but genomic biology is yet in its early stages perhaps like astronomy and cosmology was back in the 1930s. Cosmology has come a long way since then and genomics likewise has a long long way to go, but there can be little doubt that 20 or 30 years from now we will understand much more and be able to do much more as a result. No as the author points out we will probably never evolve to fly under our own power, but we will, eventually, cure cancer.

⭐Well written and readable story of the gene and the scientific research that has lead to our understanding of our genetic history up to the very recent breakthroughs of DNA sequencing. Some parts get a bit tedious and detailed; such as his list of letters in gene sequencing (pages 281 – 283); but it can be skipped without missing the main story..There is also quite a bit if personal history and information that adds little to the main points; and he tends to be a bit repetitive;. with the same information appearing in various chapters.He has a section on the science of inheritance, in particular if violence is an inherited trait, ; and uses mass-murder-shooter Adam Lanza as one example; but discount genetic inheritance as a direct consequence; though temperament and irascibility is inherited to a degree. That does not mean that such a child will develop into a murderer, or even a criminal. He makes a good point on page 323 that there would no shootings if they didn’t have guns.

⭐an easy, amusing, well-written style about the latest research into dna revelations. The description of “bush” rather than “tree” clearly explains how closely, in time, we are related. I was particularly interested in the origins and political implications of native American ancestry.

⭐This is a great book. Written in a breezy fashion but loaded with lots of scientific tidbits that will make you a big hit at the water cooler. I wish he gave more details about the mechanics of these discoveries but that’s a minor point. Great read!

⭐I purchased this book to deepen my knowledge of DNA. I recently had Ancestry DNA done and thought it would give me an overall view of this science. The book exceeded my expectations.

⭐EXCELENTE LIBRO

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