Adam Rutherford - A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

This is a story about you. It is the history of who you are and how you came to be. It is unique to you, as it is to each of the 100 billion modern humans who have ever drawn breath. But it is also our collective story, because in every one of our genomes we each carry the history of our species births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex.
Since scientists first read the human genome in 2001, it has been subject to all sorts of claims, counterclaims, and myths. In fact, as Adam Rutherford explains, our genomes should be read not as instruction manuals, but as epic poems. DNA determines far less than we have been led to believe about us as individuals, but vastly more about us as a species.
In this captivating journey through the expanding landscape of genetics, Adam Rutherford reveals what our genes now tell us about history, and what history tells us about our genes. From Neanderthals to murder, from redheads to race, dead kings to plague, evolution to epigenetics, this is a demystifying and illuminating new portrait of who we are and how we came to be.

Comment: I saw this book at the library and the theme caught my attention. I only know the basics about DNA and I wondered if this could be an interesting book to know a few things more.

This is a non fiction book, about genetics, DNA and how humans have evolved and why it can be easy to find some things through analyses and studies and why many can't be known the same way. This is not a comprehensive text but the author mentions much of the important facts scientists already know and many things in progress and even tries to explain information the public not knowledgeable on science often mistakes or uses wrongly.

In this book, the author writes the promised brief history of genetics in a way that makes it easier to understand a few details many probably still confuse. There are things that have become part of biology or science classes at school therefore familiar to most people, but I was hoping the author would develop certain things and would use many real examples to illustrate his ideas. When it comes to work on specific themes I always like it when we can have examples of real cases because it's a lot easier to connect information with actual examples instead of just theory.

In a way, I think this was achieved, I particularly liked how the author explains lactose intolerance or the dangers of inbreeding or the complexity of identifying someone's identity based on a bone or a specific element through the eyes of DNA. Often, one thinks experts should immediately have results because there is something to be used, but as with everything, facts are obvious once we discover them, but the process is slow and many times the samples cannot last after an attempted dating. Everything is much more difficult than what the public believes and I think the author did a good job trying to put it into perspective.

I suppose that, personally, what perhaps should have been included in the book would be a more obvious introduction to the theme. The author includes many notes and quotations, especially at the end of the book, but I confess some words and their definitions still elude me and I might be unfair but perhaps an explanation of how the DNA components work might make it easier to follow other information we read through the book. I say unfair because the author did try to be informative, be funny - it was so, for me, sometimes - and did try to use expressions or correlations most people would understand, but assuming readers would already know certain things and sometimes I felt I might not really know what was mentioned.

The book is divided into two main sections, what DNA has already given us in terms of what we now know of the past, and what is being done to help us with future discoveries. Both sections offer interesting information and I liked turning the pages to know more about the subject but I will confess that certain parts weren't as fascinating as others, even though the overall effect was one I enjoyed. In general, the fun part was the first where the author uses facts and discoveries and applies that to things that happened in the past and why some of them succeed, and others failed.

As with most scientific subjects, there is a lot of talk about the things that can be done with the current knowledge, and many which cannot. I suppose this is a bit frustrating because for people not in the field, how fascinating it would be to learn new things, but science is about exact facts and many just cannot be shared this way, there's no way to validate or defend one thing more than another without proper proof. The author clearly says this and repeats it often, which while necessary is still exasperating precisely because it's so vague.

This said, I liked the book, I think it accomplishes its goal well enough but I also think the author could have gone a bit further in contextualizing everything, or giving more base for some of the theories presented. I guess there are other books which do the same but for the unaware audience... perhaps this could have been it.

Grade: 7/10