dotvicky's review against another edition
4.0
A big book! But worth it overall for an excellent insight into the genetic history of our species.
kiramke's review against another edition
5.0
Love it. This is what I wanted, a review of what all has been learned since I left university. I thought I was prepared, but I'm a little surprised by how much has been refined or overturned. Man I love science.
adrienneturner's review
informative
slow-paced
3.5
While the author was a bit arrogant at times, this book was full of interesting information and perspective.
roll_n_read's review
5.0
WIP review....
First of all, I really enjoyed Adam Rutherford's writing style. He's at once witty and educational. His vocabulary forced me to ask my Google Home to "define _____" at least a few dozen times over the course of reading the book. The things he chooses to focus on are at the right depth– insightful and packed with science while also making it interesting and accessible enough to keep turning the pages.
Some of the things I marked and noted:
In chapter 1 "Horny and mobile" he discusses the "Creeps or jerks" argument, more formally known as phyletic gradualism and punctuated equilibrium, respectively. It's the question "did evolution proceed continuously or with catastrophic game-changing disruption?" "The answer, as so often is the case in science, is, broadly, a bit of both." - page 15
Lucy, born 3.2 million years ago, was discovered in 1974 and named after the Beatles song that was playing back at the researcher's base camp in Ethiopia. We don't know if she's an ancestor to the modern human, but we do know that there were many other primates living at this time, and she looks more closely related to us than any other. - page 21
"Kings play cards on fat girls' stomachs" is a funny mnemonic to help you remember the standard ranking of taxonomy: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.
-page 21
"As an attempt to distinguish between archaic Homo sapiens and us, as well as other proposed incarnations, some scientists use the subspecies classification Homo sapiens sapiens to denote modern humans." -page 22
I didn't realize Grolar bears were a thing. Grizzly polar bears! AKA Pizzly bear!
"The ability to read DNA was pioneered by the unassuming Eglish genius Fred Sanger in the late 1970s." Basically you throw nucleotide bases A, T, C, G and an enzyme called polymerase into a tube and set the temperature right, and "the double helix will separate into single strands, which serve as templates to replace the letters that would form the missing strand... Sequencing DNA is reconstruction. You make millions of copies that are fragmented at every letter. You then order them by size." Because of the negative electrical charge of DNA molecules you're able to put the DNA in a jellylike gel and run an electric charge through it to separate it all very precisely according to size... One more trick though- there are four letters of DNA so take your original gene and separate it into four tubes. You add A bases to one, T to the next and so on and then when you put these in the gel separately you'll see every position of every letter revealed. Then you collate them together to get the full sequencing. Sounds easy? Sanger picked up his second Nobel prize for Chemistry for inventing this process. -page 27-29
Interesting fact about the honey bee: almost all the bees in a social group serve their queen with whom they share exactly half their DNA.
The Y chromosome (the one that is important for determining maleness) is a tiny piece of DNA compared to the others. The X chromosome is the second biggest of all the human chromosomes. -page 33
"Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is only passed from mother to child... The sperm swims along with only half the genetic information to make a new person- twenty-two chromosomes and an X (if that child is to be a woman) or a Y- and wheedles its way into the egg, wich also carries twenty-two chromosomes and an X, and also the mtDNA of the mother." -page 34
Another interesting fact- a woman's eggs are created while she is in utero meaning the egg that made you was made inside your mother's ovaries while she was inside your grandmother.
Something I learned reading this book is that there are genes that are only passed from mother to daughter or father to son. The mtDNA comes from your mother, which came from her mother and from her mother all the way back only on your maternal side and the Y exactly the same on your paternal side.
Neanderthals
Neanderthals lived all over western Europe. Oldest bones we've found are 300,000 years old, and we haven't found any younger than 30,000 years old. Neanderthals had bigger brains than modern humans. They were shorter and stockier, thicker set, broader noses and clunkier brows. When our ancestors left Africa, they met Neanderthals and other human species in Europe and, according to our DNA, they bred with many of them. Because of the presence of the hyoid bone, we think Neanderthals probably had the capacity for speech. "If you are broadly of European descent, then it is almost certain that you also carry around Neanderthal DNA" (pg51). We learned from Croatian Neanderthal bones that we interbred around 60,000 years ago around the time presumed to be when Homo sapiens first reached Eurasia. Then Romanian bones show it happened again around 40,000 years ago. "It was beginning to look as though whenever our ancestors encountered Homo Neanderthalensis, they got it on." "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." (pg54)
The Denisovans
These are less pop-cultured famous group of humanoids that left Africa in a migration that was different from either ours or the Neanderthals. We do know that Denisovans and Neanderthals were more closely related to each other than either was to any living human. (58) We also see an implication from their DNA that "they also had admixed and interbred with another species, one for whom we have no DNA to compare. A ghost population, a group of humans who are only known by the spectral presence they left in DNA as an outcome of sex." (61)
One of the main themes of this book: "Whenever humans met– sapiens, Neanderthal, Denisovan–they had sex." (63)
"We anatomically modern humans are generally thought to have evolved primarily in eastern Africa around 200,000 years ago and emerged sometime in the last 100,000 years.
A typical length of a gene is around a thousand letters (nucleotides) long. - page 47
Three billion letters of DNA make up my genome.
"Knowing precisely how a gene is spelled is NOT enough to say precisely what it does." - page 49
The 123 of Homo Sapien migration
1. Hunter gatherers move up from Africa, mate with Neanderthals
2. Farmers enter the scene from the east
3. Yamnaya also comes from the east (Russian steppes) with sheep and wagons and bronze.
"If you are pale skinned, you are almost certainly a product of these three waves of European immigration" (74)
Milk
For most of human history lactase has been active only in babies, which means that adults can't process milk well. We guess the lactase mutation comes out in humans around 5,000 to 10,000 years BCE presumably as a mutation that was to the advantage of farmers that survived better on dairy during hard times.
First of all, I really enjoyed Adam Rutherford's writing style. He's at once witty and educational. His vocabulary forced me to ask my Google Home to "define _____" at least a few dozen times over the course of reading the book. The things he chooses to focus on are at the right depth– insightful and packed with science while also making it interesting and accessible enough to keep turning the pages.
Some of the things I marked and noted:
In chapter 1 "Horny and mobile" he discusses the "Creeps or jerks" argument, more formally known as phyletic gradualism and punctuated equilibrium, respectively. It's the question "did evolution proceed continuously or with catastrophic game-changing disruption?" "The answer, as so often is the case in science, is, broadly, a bit of both." - page 15
Lucy, born 3.2 million years ago, was discovered in 1974 and named after the Beatles song that was playing back at the researcher's base camp in Ethiopia. We don't know if she's an ancestor to the modern human, but we do know that there were many other primates living at this time, and she looks more closely related to us than any other. - page 21
"Kings play cards on fat girls' stomachs" is a funny mnemonic to help you remember the standard ranking of taxonomy: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.
-page 21
"As an attempt to distinguish between archaic Homo sapiens and us, as well as other proposed incarnations, some scientists use the subspecies classification Homo sapiens sapiens to denote modern humans." -page 22
I didn't realize Grolar bears were a thing. Grizzly polar bears! AKA Pizzly bear!
"The ability to read DNA was pioneered by the unassuming Eglish genius Fred Sanger in the late 1970s." Basically you throw nucleotide bases A, T, C, G and an enzyme called polymerase into a tube and set the temperature right, and "the double helix will separate into single strands, which serve as templates to replace the letters that would form the missing strand... Sequencing DNA is reconstruction. You make millions of copies that are fragmented at every letter. You then order them by size." Because of the negative electrical charge of DNA molecules you're able to put the DNA in a jellylike gel and run an electric charge through it to separate it all very precisely according to size... One more trick though- there are four letters of DNA so take your original gene and separate it into four tubes. You add A bases to one, T to the next and so on and then when you put these in the gel separately you'll see every position of every letter revealed. Then you collate them together to get the full sequencing. Sounds easy? Sanger picked up his second Nobel prize for Chemistry for inventing this process. -page 27-29
Interesting fact about the honey bee: almost all the bees in a social group serve their queen with whom they share exactly half their DNA.
The Y chromosome (the one that is important for determining maleness) is a tiny piece of DNA compared to the others. The X chromosome is the second biggest of all the human chromosomes. -page 33
"Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is only passed from mother to child... The sperm swims along with only half the genetic information to make a new person- twenty-two chromosomes and an X (if that child is to be a woman) or a Y- and wheedles its way into the egg, wich also carries twenty-two chromosomes and an X, and also the mtDNA of the mother." -page 34
Another interesting fact- a woman's eggs are created while she is in utero meaning the egg that made you was made inside your mother's ovaries while she was inside your grandmother.
Something I learned reading this book is that there are genes that are only passed from mother to daughter or father to son. The mtDNA comes from your mother, which came from her mother and from her mother all the way back only on your maternal side and the Y exactly the same on your paternal side.
Neanderthals
Neanderthals lived all over western Europe. Oldest bones we've found are 300,000 years old, and we haven't found any younger than 30,000 years old. Neanderthals had bigger brains than modern humans. They were shorter and stockier, thicker set, broader noses and clunkier brows. When our ancestors left Africa, they met Neanderthals and other human species in Europe and, according to our DNA, they bred with many of them. Because of the presence of the hyoid bone, we think Neanderthals probably had the capacity for speech. "If you are broadly of European descent, then it is almost certain that you also carry around Neanderthal DNA" (pg51). We learned from Croatian Neanderthal bones that we interbred around 60,000 years ago around the time presumed to be when Homo sapiens first reached Eurasia. Then Romanian bones show it happened again around 40,000 years ago. "It was beginning to look as though whenever our ancestors encountered Homo Neanderthalensis, they got it on." "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." (pg54)
The Denisovans
These are less pop-cultured famous group of humanoids that left Africa in a migration that was different from either ours or the Neanderthals. We do know that Denisovans and Neanderthals were more closely related to each other than either was to any living human. (58) We also see an implication from their DNA that "they also had admixed and interbred with another species, one for whom we have no DNA to compare. A ghost population, a group of humans who are only known by the spectral presence they left in DNA as an outcome of sex." (61)
One of the main themes of this book: "Whenever humans met– sapiens, Neanderthal, Denisovan–they had sex." (63)
"We anatomically modern humans are generally thought to have evolved primarily in eastern Africa around 200,000 years ago and emerged sometime in the last 100,000 years.
A typical length of a gene is around a thousand letters (nucleotides) long. - page 47
Three billion letters of DNA make up my genome.
"Knowing precisely how a gene is spelled is NOT enough to say precisely what it does." - page 49
The 123 of Homo Sapien migration
1. Hunter gatherers move up from Africa, mate with Neanderthals
2. Farmers enter the scene from the east
3. Yamnaya also comes from the east (Russian steppes) with sheep and wagons and bronze.
"If you are pale skinned, you are almost certainly a product of these three waves of European immigration" (74)
Milk
For most of human history lactase has been active only in babies, which means that adults can't process milk well. We guess the lactase mutation comes out in humans around 5,000 to 10,000 years BCE presumably as a mutation that was to the advantage of farmers that survived better on dairy during hard times.