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THE INVISIBLE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN RACE : How DNA And History Shape Our Identities And Our Futures
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The Invisible History Of The Human Race : How DNA And History Shape Our Identities And Our Futures

Christine Kenneally
BRAND NEW, HARDCOVER
Christine Kenneally
BRAND NEW, HARDCOVER

RM28.00

How Our Stories, Psychology, And Genetics Affect Our
Past & Our Future

ISBN 9780670025558
Book Condition BRAND NEW
Format HARDCOVER
Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc
Publication Date 19/11/2014
Pages 366
Weight 0.62 kg
Dimension 23.1 × 16.3 × 3.6 cm
Availability: 1 in stock

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Description

★★ A New York Times Notable Book ★★

“The richest, freshest, most fun book on genetics in some time.”
— The New York Times Book Review

We are doomed to repeat history if we fail to learn from it, but how are we affected by the forces that are invisible to us?

The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures seeks to show how “the concept of ancestry can bring genetics and history together fruitfully.”

Author Christine Kenneally is very successful in this objective, weaving together stories of genealogy, historical records, and genetic science

In The Invisible History of the Human Race Christine Kenneally draws on cutting-edge research to reveal how both historical artifacts and DNA tell us where we come from and where we may be going.

While some books explore our genetic inheritance and popular television shows celebrate ancestry, this is the first book to explore how everything from DNA to emotions to names and the stories that form our lives are all part of our human legacy.

Kenneally shows how trust is inherited in Africa, silence is passed down in Tasmania, and how the history of nations is written in our DNA.

From fateful, ancient encounters to modern mass migrations and medical diagnoses, Kenneally explains how the forces that shaped the history of the world ultimat

This fascinating reader-friendly book covers a diverse but related set of topics including :
✔ ancient human origins,
✔ the history of our fascination with genealogy and ancestors,
✔ the inexplicable longevity of ideas that arise in a culture almost incidentally,
✔ the latest sometimes surprising finding about the workings of the human genome, and the benefits, risks,
✔ and limits of DNA testing for disease likelihood, cultural identity, and prehistoric ancestry.

Here is some of what intrigued me the most:

● The gene whose mutation causes Huntington’s disease is ancient enough to be found in slime mold. It’s crucial to slime mold, when it’s disabled the slime mold will sicken, but when a nearly identical human copy of the gene is inserted the slime mold revives.

● Someone can be your direct blood ancestor but contribute nothing to your actual DNA–it’s not as simple as having one-sixteenth of your DNA from each of your great-great-grandparents.

● Ideas tend to stick around way past their expiration date. For instance, the author cites research indicating that in areas where people farmed wheat and began using the plow, which requires a lot of upper body strength, the idea developed that men should be in the field/world and women should stay in the home–it was seen as natural and right.

Now hundreds of years later, and even though no one in the area is still farming, that belief persists, having been passed down somehow through generations, and is more prevalent than in communities which didn’t use the plow, like in places where rice was farmed instead.

The pernicious latent influence of institutions like slavery is also discussed in this chapter.

She divides the book into three sections:

I. Ideas About What Is Passed Down Are Passed Down – a somewhat awkward way of describing the four chapters that deal with the negative perceptions of genealogy, hidden family histories, and the terrible ideas behind eugenics and the Third Reich’s racial doctrines. Kenneally explores the way that our genealogical history has been tied to social status and a sense of belonging in exclusive groups.

II. What is Passed Down? – a mix of information on genealogy and DNA. Kenneally also uses this section to talk about what is not passed down – those parts of our past that we remain silent about.

III. How What Is Passed Down Shapes Bodies and Minds – two short chapters on how our family history or the information in our genes affect us today. These continue the conversations in section II to give a modern look at how our society thinks about these issues.

I think the best parts of The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures are those sections that help to illuminate how each of us is part of a broader fabric that extends backwards and forwards in time. In “Do Not Ask What Gets Passed Down,” Kenneally writes:

” We live in a temporal envelope. For most of us the horizon extends forward maybe two generations and back just two or three.

It is hard to break out of the mind-set that we stand at a crucial center point of that span and that all the people who came before were merely precursors to us.

It isn’t until you populate the family tree that it becomes clear how brief a human life is, how soon it is over, and how you only play a bit part in a story line that expands out and contracts back and goes off in directions that no one can predict or control.”

Kenneally also is careful to point out that, despite the modern advances in recording information and examining our genetic code, modern technologies and businesses are incredibly temporary.

From the Domesday genealogical information burned on to laser discs that can no longer be read to the genetic testing company sold and your information sold with it, we need to be cautious in how we proceed with documenting and sharing our histories.

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Review From The Monthly.Com :

Our ancestors are always with us.

It is precisely this enduring if elusive presence, inscribed in our genetic inheritance and manifested in sometimes less rational aspects of humanity, that interests Christine Kenneally.

Like many of us at some point in our life, Kenneally is preoccupied by her family tree and its meaning. It is vast and sprawling, with unfathomable roots, and never stops growing.

Thanks to modern information technology, its mining of personal data and advances in genetics, we are able to piece together the story of human existence on the planet.

At the same time as we understand more about how physical traits are replicated over millennia, researchers are becoming increasingly aware of the extent to which ideas and feelings also are passed down the generations within families, communities, cultures and ethnic groups.

One of the topics Kenneally considers is ancient prejudice: how negative attitudes towards certain groups appear to have origins in the distant past yet can survive and even at times undergo a resurgence despite being wholly irrational.

In early agrarian societies, for instance, women may not have had the upper body strength to wield a plough, and so a division of labour along gender lines may have made some practical sense then.

But Kenneally cites research that has found that even today there is “greater inequality and women [are] less common in the workforce” among individuals whose ancestors used a plough – even if they themselves had never used one.

In some cases, the basis of the prejudice itself may be irrational. The persistence of anti-Semitism in certain parts of Germany, for instance, can be traced as far back as Jews being blamed in the 14th century for the catastrophic bubonic plague.

Family history today is an industry of staggering global proportions, but why do so many people take such an obsessive interest in, and indeed feel pride or shame about, their distant forebears?

As the author hints, the past is one place where we will surely find what we are looking for in the present.

Kenneally’s first book, The First Word, traced the origins of language. With her second study of what makes us human, Kenneally again proves herself to be one of the most original, inclusive and engaging contemporary thinkers we have.

This is one, quite literally, for all the family.

About the Author
Christine Kenneally is an award-winning journalist and the author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Melbourne, Australia.

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