A book to consult before swabbing, full of insight into the uses and abuses of genetics.
A science journalist searches deep for roots and finds them in the deepest helixes of her genetic code.
“The fact is that my forebears—in the direct maternal line—were among the anatomically modern, musical and artistic humans who first colonized Europe.” That claim is laden with import. Swedish science journalist and editor Bojs has been following advances in DNA research for decades, work that, she writes, has led to interviewing some 70 scientists and visiting 10 countries. As she recounts in this well-written work of popular science, those travels have involved not just Bojs as an entity, but also her genetic inheritance: amino acids that led to the now-submerged Dogger Bank, off the coast of England; the far-flung Arctic tribes marked by the haplogroup U4; and to scattered places in the Balkans and Greece, “along the routes taken by Europe’s first farmers on their way northwards toward Central Europe.” Such researches lead to big-picture questions that mirror work that has been done in the prehistory of North America: for instance, as Bojs writes, were immigrants responsible for the spread of farming into what is now Scandinavia, “or was the technology itself simply adapted by local hunting populations?” As she acknowledges, although genetic studies yield insight into such matters as the role of disease in early human populations, they are also fraught with possibilities for a racialized view of the human past, whence the whole business of Aryan purity and the interest of some totalitarian regimes in establishing the primacy of favored genotypes and phenotypes. Though she begins with that proud claim of descent from modern humans, Bojs closes with darker discoveries of mental illness in her lineage. Though she reckons herself fairly lucky in the genetic lottery, she argues that genes are not “selfish,” in Richard Dawkins’ sense, but two-faced: “what is good or bad depends on the combination and the context.”
A book to consult before swabbing, full of insight into the uses and abuses of genetics.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4729-4147-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
There's an elegant, albeit humbling, logic to the first three books in the Science Masters Series, all coming in October. In the middle is Leakey (Origins Reconsidered, 1992, etc.) writing about, well, us. Then, lest we acquire an inflated notion of our own importance, there are the ultimate bookends of the beginning and the end of the universe: The Origin of the Universe, by John D. Barrow (Astronomy/Univ. of Sussex, England; PI in the Sky, 1992, etc.) and The Last Three Minutes, by Paul Davies (Natural Philosophy/Univ. of Adelaide, Australia; The Mind of God, 1991, etc.). The series is being published by an international consortium of 16 publishers. It's a serious, much-needed effort to bring practicing scientists in touch with the general public. Other heavyweight brainiacs lined up for the series include philosopher and cog-sci guy Daniel C. Dennett; paleontologist (and DiMaggiologist) Stephen Jay Gould; anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson; and artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky. This is good publishing. PBS, eat your heart out.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-465-03135-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
IN THE NEWS
In the prehistoric days before Jurassic Park and Barney, the focus of dinosaur-mania for anyone growing up in New York City was the American Museum of Natural History, where the looming skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex inspired awe in generations of children. Now, with the renovation and extension of its dinosaur exhibit, that venerable and much-loved institution offers a history of its paleontology department, from its creation in 1891 to the present day. Among the adventures Wallace (The Audubon Society Pocket Guide to Dinosaurs, not reviewed) recounts are those of Barnum Brown (known as ``Mr. Bones''), who discovered the museum's T. rex in Hell Creek, Mont., in 1907; Roy Chapman Andrews, whose dinosaur- hunting fields in 1922 were in the Gobi Desert, where he unearthed the giant rhinoceros Paraceratherium; to Malcolm McKenna, who returned to the Gobi in the 1990s and found the remains of the Velociraptor. No amount of cinematic magic can surpass the wonder induced by a personal encounter with the remains of these giants who once stalked the earth.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-86590-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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