Name: A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived
ISBN: 9781071520048

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

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. A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived will upend your thinking on Neanderthals, evolution, royalty, race, and even redheads. (For example, we now know that at least four human species once roamed the earth.) Plus, here is the remarkable, controversial story of how our genes made their way to the Americas--one that's still being written, as ever more of us have our DNA sequenced. Rutherford closes with "A Short Introduction to the Future of Humankind," filled with provocative questions that we're on the cusp of answering: Are we still in the grasp of natural selection? Are we evolving for better or worse? And... where do we go from here?

What Hacker News says

wiremineFeb 2019

Agreed the title should include the year of the article: 1995. It is reacting to the book "The Bell Curve" which was published in 1994. The wikipedia article is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

TL;DR; White people are genetically smarter than black people.

(To be transparent: I'm a white father to a black daughter... the book is bull shit IMHO)

That said: If you enjoy genetics, I'd recommend "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived", which uses actual science and is much more recent:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30135182-a-brief-history...

The author's style is entertaining and insightful, although a bit flowery. As a reviewer on Good Reads mentioned "That was very... British."

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l0b0Sep 2018

If you want a very good summary of recent genetics research results, have a look at Adam Rutherford's A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes. Basically, even the most careful and underwhelming claims from the popular press overstate how much we actually understand about the connection between genes and real world attributes of people.

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ganonmMay 2017

I would highly recommend reading 'A brief history of everyone who ever lived' by Adam Rutherford. IIRC it contains a whole chapter on GWASs (pronounced jee-wazzes).

There are some phenotypes (characteristics) which clearly can be associated with a small number of genes (e.g. autosomal recessive disorders) , however for many phenotypes such as intelligence, it takes a lot more effort to correlate them with underlying genotypes. The fact that intelligence is approximately normally distributed is an indicator that there are many individual effects at play.

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musiciangamesJan 2025

Ewan Birney opened a betting book at a meeting of the Human Genome Project in 2000. For a dollar a bet, he asked the world’s top geneticists to predict how many genes a human has. The prize for the nearest guess was the pot and a bottle of scotch. The winning bet, by Lee Rowen, was 25,947. The real number is around 20,000.

-Adam Rutherford, A Brief History Of Everyone Who Ever Lived 2016

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