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Title: Deep Ancestry: Inside The Genographic Project
ISBN: 1426201184
Author:
Spencer Wells
Publicate Date: 2007-11-20
Publish: 2007-11-20
List Price: $12.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $7.32
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $7.32
Amazon Merchant Price: $10.36
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Great Information! Great Work!
This is a great complement to the Seven Daughters Of Eve. The story of where we, the human race, originated is so essential to understand! This book details not only this but how his and his colleagues' work are helping people get back to their roots.
They are helping people understand where they came from - their 'belonging' in this world. What a great thing to do!
More importantly, this shows how we are all interconnected and really is a death-blow to racism in all its forms.
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2: Read Journey and Forget This One
Most of the info in this book is a rehash of the history of genetic biology that Wells covered in his first book. He tells you what he is doing with the new data gathering, but if you read the first book, you will quickly become bored. Wells is brilliant and like Brian Sykes, he is doing important work in unravelling our ancestral past. Unfortunately, Wells is better at telling you what he doing rather than writing about it.
The man often takes two or three pages to explain something that should only take one or two paragraphs to explain adequately. I find that overly pedantic. This is common practice for most academics.
Wells also made a passive/aggressive political comment that I found to be irksome in a book about genetic anthropology. He said "I met with President Clinton at the end of his second term when the President was still arguably the most powerful man in the world." I've got news for Spence. The President of the United States is still the most powerful man in the world and it's not arguable. The U.S. is the most powerful economy in the world and Bush's policies helped to add an enormous amount of wealth to everyone in the world. We produce twenty five percent of the world's GDP with less than five percent of the planet's population. The President is the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military in the world and he can project our country's military power anywhere on this globe. It is not arguable. I know Wells spent several years at Cambridge that is still a hotbed of English communism, but I expected a little more common sense from a true genius prodigy.
While the first book was good if a little tiresome, the second book is a real snore. Wells is much better talking on film. I recommend his DVDs and the first book, but the money saved on this one could be better spent on Sykes' Seven Daughters of Eve.
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3: Interesting and educational
I have to admit this is a subject that already interested me but I was very impressed with the writing style and how fun it has been to read! Written almost like a fun story but with very interesting and understandable science behind it.
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4: Wells coats his science in political correctness
While his books are interesting, one thing that becomes abundantly clear to anyone with a working knowledge of ancestral genetics is that Wells goes out of his way to preach "we are all the same" and "race is meaningless". While both statements have an element of truth to them, they don't tell the whole story. Good scientific writers don't try to push a message. Rather, they lay the facts out and allow the reader to do with it what they will. There are very real, empirical genetic differences between ethnic groups--an indisputable fact embraced by serious medical geneticists. This may make some people uncomfortable and provide ammunition for racial bigotry, but playing a shell game with facts does a disservice to science and humanity.
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5: Good things sometimes come in small packages
Deep Ancestry is the story of us. Or the story of how scientists are figuring out the story of us.
Meant to be an introduction to the National Geographic's Genographic Project, Deep Ancestry provides a summary of the complicated genetic discoveries being made by researchers every day.
Author Spencer Wells uses real life people's stories to introduce concepts like haplogroups and population genetics in order to break up the technobabble that cannot really be avoided without entirely dumbing down the ideas he's trying to convey.
A good chunk of the end of the book is a detailed appendix with entries describing each haplogroup (Y chromosome and mtDNA), including all the various markers that point the way to the groups earliest common ancestor. This section seems best suited to those who have purchased a DNA testing kit and want to research their test results.
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