Adam Rutherford
Adam David Rutherford is a British geneticist, author, and broadcaster. He was an audio-visual content editor for the journal Nature for a decade, is a frequent contributor to the newspaper The Guardian, hosts the BBC Radio 4 programme Inside Science, has produced several science documentaries and has published books related to genetics and the origin of life.
2 Books Written
The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War and the Evolution of Us
by Adam Rutherford
Rating: 3.8 ⭐
• 2 recommendations ❤️
We like to think of ourselves as exceptional beings, but is there really anything special about us that sets us apart from other animals? Humans are the slightest of twigs on a single family tree that encompasses four billion years, a lot of twists and turns, and a billion species. All of those organisms are rooted in a single origin, with a common code that underwrites our existence. This paradox - that our biology is indistinct from all life, yet we consider ourselves to be special - lies at the heart of who we are.In this original and entertaining tour of life on Earth, Adam Rutherford explores how many of the things once considered to be exclusively human are not: we are not the only species that communicates, makes tools, utilises fire, or has sex for reasons other than to make new versions of ourselves. Evolution has, however, allowed us to develop our culture to a level of complexity that outstrips any other observed in nature.THE BOOK OF HUMANS tells the story of how we became the creatures we are today, bestowed with the unique ability to investigate what makes us who we are. Illuminated by the latest scientific discoveries, it is a thrilling compendium of what unequivocally fixes us as animals, and reveals how we are extraordinary among them.
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes
by Adam Rutherford
Rating: 4.1 ⭐
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. But those stories have always been locked away—until now, with the invention of genomics, a tool that lets scientists decode our DNA. The implications for our identity are enormous. As acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford shows, before genomics, we never really knew much about ourselves at all. And so he rewrites all of human history—from 100,000 years ago to the present, and on topics as wide-ranging as Neanderthals and murder, redheads and race, dead kings and plague, evolution and epigenetics—using genetics to shatter deeply held beliefs about our heritage, and to replace them with new answers to some of the biggest questions of all: Who we are, and how we came to be.