A Brief History of Everyone who Ever Lived

I read this book. It's a mashup of very cool information about our genes. It covers all the interesting things we want to know....

I didn't understand all of it. The book is a wild mix of the vernacular and the scientific. Much was like this:

“Red hair appearing exclusively in beards in not uncommon, though we don't really know why. Forgive us; it's not really been a research priority over the last few decades.”

Perfect. Intriguing. Readable. Quotable. I read on.

But chunks of it were like this:

“The vast majority of Brits, and northern and Western Europeans (including places colonized by them) have a single change, a C becomes a T, around 13,000 letters of DNA before the start of the lactase gene....Thirteen thousand nucleotides upstream of the beginning of the lactase gene is a region that controls its activity, and a mutation in that distant control center accounts for the vast majority of milk drinkers.”

I gave up on this book about halfway through the month. Some of it was just tedious, I thought. I got ready to return it to the library today, and, unexpectedly, I got all caught up in it again.

“You are of royal descent, because everyone is.”

“The science of genetics was founded specifically on the study of racial inequality, by a racist.”

“The unglamorous truth is that there are but a handful of uniquely human traits that we have clearly demonstrated are adaptations evolved to thrive in specific geographical regions. Skin color is one. The ability to digest milk is another....”

“Earwax is of great interest to people like me....We like it because it's one of a very small handful of traits that has a relatively straightforward relationship between the DNA and its outcome....”

And so I, reluctantly at first and then compulsively for the rest of the afternoon, I read on. Fascinating stuff. Mixed with a lot of paragraphs of tmi, imho.