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121 " We have no room for the mystical in science "
― Adam Rutherford , A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes
122 " genetic genealogy companies will sell you kits that claim to grant you membership to historical peoples, albeit ill-defined, highly romanticized versions of ancient Europeans. This type of genetic astrology, though unscientific and distasteful to my palate, is really just a bit of meaningless fantasy; its real damage is that it undermines scientific literacy in the general public. "
123 " Yes, the presentations and formal lectures at scientific meetings can be dreadfully important, but – and this is a trade secret – they can be breathtakingly boring. Sometimes "
124 " But in the bar, the real science gets scrutinized and the best ideas assembled. Lifelong collaborations and friendships are made, bitter squabbles and permanent enmities are forged. "
125 " Creationists (and others unencumbered by facts) cite epigenetics to assert that Darwin was wrong, and that these transgenerational epigenetic studies show Lamarckian evolution. They don’t, as the changes are not perpetual and do not change the DNA sequence itself, on which natural selection acts. Even "
126 " In the human genome, in total, there are around 3 billion individual letters of DNA. Of the analogies of scale, the one that gets trotted out most frequently is that this is equivalent to some twenty standard-issue phone books, though when I use that in lectures these days most school kids have never seen a phone book. "
127 " New Age gurus and gullible journalists cite epigenetics as a way of changing your life, under the false supposition that genes are destiny, and epigenetic changes brought on by lifestyle choices such as meditation ‘allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate’, to quote the supreme New Age guru, Deepak Chopra. I suppose that really depends on what you mean by ‘fate’. If you are fated to digest your lunch, then yes, epigenetics will play a key part. If you are destined to go to sleep tonight, your epigenetic tagging will change accordingly. There "
128 " Nobodies from the past are being elevated to some of the most important people who ever lived. "
129 " 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. "
130 " Humans are both horny and mobile. "
131 " Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” Job 5:7 "
132 " Twain wrote in 1869 that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Galton had explored extensively in the 1840s, as privileged young men often did in the nineteenth century, to Turkey and through the Middle East and Egypt. He went further, into what is now Namibia, on a two-year trip with the Royal Geographical Society, and published bestsellers describing his journeys into the heart of darkness. But Galton didn’t adhere to Twain’s maxim. He maintained and grew a deep-rooted sense of hierarchies of the peoples of the world, and formalized it later in his life under a number of auspices. "
133 " 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. "
134 " 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. "
135 " 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 "
136 " There’s no trace of genetic fair skin between those two dates. "
137 " 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. "
138 " 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. "
139 " from the point of view of a geneticist, race does not exist. It has no useful scientific value. "
140 " Charles Darwin formulated his idea 50 years before genes, 100 before the double helix, and 150 before the human genome was read. But they all say the same thing. Life is a chemical reaction. Life is derived from what came before. Life is imperfect copying. Life is the accumulation and refinement of information embedded in DNA. Natural selection explains how, once it had started, life evolved on Earth. We busy ourselves refining the theory, and working out the details with a scrutiny and precision that has been enabled and invigorated by reading genome after genome, and crunching those numbers until comprehensible patterns emerge. We are the data. "