I spent the better part of my undergraduate career lugging around massive biology textbooks.  General biology, genetics, embryology: It didn’t matter, they all weighed a ton. I pored over endless chapters of text, highlighting the important sentences, always wishing for more photos, more diagrams, more graphs. A single well-made diagram or image was easier to [...]

Tags: DNA, genetics, The Stuff of Life

Almost since the 1871 publication of “The Descent of Man,” in which Charles Darwin applied his theory of natural selection to the human species, biologists have argued over whether the dramatic series of evolutionary events that led to the emergence of Homo sapiens continues to this day.
Some have argued that culture and technology have eclipsed [...]

Tags: agriculture, evolution, G6PD deficiency, Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending, lactose tolerance, sickle-cell anemia

For more than a century anthropologists have studied the multitude of cultures and ethnicities that exist across the globe, delving deep into the various ways that populations develop their own unique identities. With the development of genetic anthropology over the last 15 years, scientists have begun to examine whether these cultural identities align with [...]

If anybody could turn the history of genetic anthropology into a page-turner, it would be Bryan Sykes. Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, has spent the better of part the last 25 years decoding the mystery of our species’ genetic ancestry through mitochondrial DNA analysis. He recounts his work [...]