A Brief History of Everyone who Ever Lived

Goodness me, this was a good book! Right from the start, Rutherford states that the book won't be littered with references to research papers throughout and the book reads very much like Rutherford is quite literally telling me a story (I should add that references are added in the appendix of the book if you want to validate and have further reading on the subject of DNA).

I always feel like when I read non-fiction I'm supposed to be a little smarter once I've finished, and somehow retain my newly acquired knowledge so I can wax lyrical later on in the pub in years to come...

The subject of this book is (as the title suggest) genes, DNA and how it all works. The book is fascinating, and although I'm certain that I'm zero percent smarter now (sadly my own failing!), Rutherford's book was littered with fascinating stories from both recent and distant history - which have so far stuck in my head.

I got wind of this book via my own genealogy research, and being able to find every step in my ancestry to William The Conqueror, I posted a tweet and eventually saw a reply from Adam Rutherford explaining “that's cool that you can demonstrate it with genealogy, but it's literally true for all British people too. Edward 3 is the direct ancestor of every British person”.

That snippet reply alone piqued my interest in reading this book, and damn glad I did - I think I highlighted nearly two pages worth of kindle notes, partly to help me remember and partly because there was some superb stuff in there, including:

> borborygmus, which is a technical word for a rumbly tummy.

Rutherford's writing and storytelling is entertaining, informative and even regularly funny.

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.

I thought this was really quite good.

It's one of the most entertaining and humorous nonfiction books and I'd recommend it to a lot of people. For me, the readability of this seemed very simple. Rutherford explained a lot and used examples for difficult concepts. Granted, I'm pretty familiar with a lot of what was discussed in this book to start with, so I can't speak to the technicality's readability with 100% accuracy.

I got out of this book what I expected to get out of it and I'm really happy with it! It's a good way to start off 2021, despite all the other craziness going on right now.