Adam Rutherford's Book "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived" - Uncovering the Story of Humanity's Past

Djalma M. Argollo: O autor nos convida para acompanhá-lo numa visão objetiva da nossa evolução

Brazil on Nov 13, 2023

Texas Bill: Liked it for the things I learned, for the writing style of this author that made the reading/learning enjoyable, even addictive. Highly recommend this book. I'm already looking for my next read from Adam Rutherford

United States on Sep 13, 2023

david61821: I heard Adam Rutherford on a Peaceful Science podcast and was stimulated to buy this book. I am impressed with how well he writes. I'm not a biologist but found myself getting into the story of humanity Rutherford was telling. I found myself eager to keep reading to see how the story at hand would end. He has an easy style and recognizes that genetic and genomic science is new to many readers and seeks to explain the terms he uses. He helpfully included a glossary of terms in the back which I used often enough to remind myself until I was confident I understood the terms as he later used them. I also appreciated how he situates science in the project of human knowing. Science is ever learning, ever correcting, and so we should need to keep revisiting the story science tells of humanity as "we" learn more.

I very much enjoyed Chapter 5, "The End of Race." I think this is a significant chapter for us as we think about current issues of racial injustice. He wrote (p. 218): "Racism is hateful bullying, and a means of reinforcing self-identity at the expense of others: Whatever you are, you're not one of us. If there is on thing that my own torturous family tree demonstrates it...

United States on Jul 26, 2020

Matthew Rapaport: This is a book about genetics, about what the human genome (the "complete map" first sketched out in 2000 and by 2018 in considerably more detail). "Complete map" is in quotes because as Dr. Rutherford points out there yet remain 99% of the whole genetic compliment whose origin and function we do not yet fully understand. This is the lesson of the whole book. We began to understand what genetics did back in the mid 1800s given Darwin, Galton, and Mendel. By the late 1950s we had connected inheritance to DNA. By the 1980s we had a handle on some genes and their DNA mapping. In 2000 or so we identified all of 20 million human genes, meaning genes that actually result in proteins. Today, in 2018 we understand much more about those parts of our genome (every person's whole compliment of DNA) that serve other purposes, but there remains much to learn.

This book is about all of that. In its first part it is about what modern genetics tells us about the evolution and migration of human beings, both of the modern sort we all are, and some of the various alternative species of Homo that occupied the Earth earlier than modern man and for a while along side them. This is not a...

United States on Mar 10, 2019

Serghiou Const: The author's writing is engaging, at times candid, but invariably the result of rigorous research and precise science.

Our genomes, genes plus non-coding DNA is a repository of the journey of life on earth - 4 billion years of error and trial that resulted in us. Our genome is the totality of our DNA, 3 billion letters (bases-nucleotides) of it. All human genomes host the same genes, but they may be slightly different, which accounts for the fact that we are all incredibly similar and utterly unique. By comparing those differences we can make inferences about how closely two people are and when these differences evolved. We can now extend these comparisons to all humanity, as long as we can extract DNA from our cells.

The first complete human genome was published in in 2001 at great acclaim but comprised only a sketchy draft read-out of the genetic material of just few individuals. To obtain this result, it had taken hundreds of scientists the better part of a decade, and had cost in the order of $3 billion, approximately $1 per letter. Just fifteen years later things have overwhelmingly improved in speed and cost while the amount of data from individual genomes is...

United Kingdom on Aug 06, 2017

Longbelly: The book is amusing enough and has some interesting historical anecdotes as well as a very basic overview of genetics for the layman.

However, the chapter on "The End of Race" is incredibly mendacious guff - full of strawman arguments, self-contradiction, and outright falsehood - which seems to serve no purpose other than to virtue signal to his Guardian colleagues (and 'preach to the choir' in terms of readers) and to actively stigmatize the valid questions over the extent to which 'race' (however it is defined) is identifiable by genetics.

The fact he actively, and completely uncritically, pushes Lewontin's fallacy - without the slightest acknowledgement that it's disputed (to say the least) if not outright nonsense - is completely inexcusable. He even refers to the papers by Rosenberg et al as having further strengthened Lewontin's daftness when the reality is that those papers (if you bother to read them) actually further undermined his claims and emphatically demonstrated the ability of genetics to reliably distinguish between people of different ethnic groups/'races'.

At one point he tries to sum up his argument by refuting a claim literally no-one has...

United Kingdom on Aug 02, 2017

H. A. Weedon: This work by Adam Rutherford has received glowing reviews from a number of well known leading scientists including Richard Dawkins. It is kind of these great people to do this. All I can say is, I've read most of Dawkins' works, which I never tire of returning to, and he packs more relevant information into one page than Rutherford manges to get into ten. It's one thing to enjoy a tasty waffle: to be continually served up with them is quite another. Rutherford tells us he is an Ipswich man. Well, he certainly isn't if he was born and reared where he went to school in Capel Saint Mary, which is nearly ten miles south of Ipswich. Some of my relations used to live there and I was born and brought up in the village of Helmingham, ten miles north of Ipswich, which makes me a Suffolk man. All people born in Ipswich are Suffolk people, but not all people born in Suffolk are Ipswich people. This may seem a minor point. However, if Rutherford was born in Capel Saint Mary and calls himself an Ipswich man, how can we be sure he isn't wrong concerning other matters? The Suffolk folk I grew up with used to say: 'Don't waffle: say what you mean, mean what you say and get to the...

United Kingdom on Jan 16, 2017

Strv 74: The Title of this book is a very bold one. Can you write a history of everyone who has ever lived in 375 pages? No you cant. The Title is probably to catch your interest for the book but having read it you will have a lot of questions. But lets start with the good parts of the book.

It is a very well written book. The Subject of DNA can be made horribly complicated and it is very easy to produce a book that will get you bored and confused after a few minutes. Not this one. Dr. Rutherford manages to write a story that is highly interesting and easy to follow. Most of the book is both engaging and educating.

There is a lot of information in the book and I found myself making lots of notes. Some of the statements that modern DNA research has brought forward are astonishing and hard to accept but I don't doubt Dr. Rutherfords statements. This is a book that I would recommend anyone to read if you are interested in the question of who we are and where we came from.

The Book is divided into two major parts. How we came to be and Who we are. The First part is very good and the second less so but still very readable.

But, there are a number of things that will...

United Kingdom on Oct 23, 2016