My Royal Blood, Or, A Gene's Eye View of History
Book Review: Adam Rutherford, "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes", Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017. In the epilogue to the latest edition of The Selfish Gene ( see my review here ), Richard Dawkins marvels at modern techniques in genomics, which can reveal the geographic and demographic traits of our ancestors. As an appropriate follow-up to that book, I decided to read Adam Rutherford's A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived , which Mr. Dawkins himself apparently considers "stimulating" and "right". The title of the book seems to be inspired by A Short History of Nearly Everything , but that's just my hunch. Needless to say, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived is not literally about everyone who every lived. Rather, it is about the history of the human species viewed through the lens of genetics (in combination with some archaeology, anthropology and so on). But in a sense it is about every per...