15 Quotes by David Reich

We are now producing data so fast that the time lag between data production and publication is longer than the time it takes to double the data in the field.

Tracing back fifty thousand years in the past, our genome is scattered into more than one hundred thousand ancestral stretches of DNA, greater than the number of people who lived in any population at that time, so we inherit DNA from nearly everyone in our ancestral population who had a substantial number of offspring at times that remote in the past.

Seventy thousand years ago, the world was populated by very diverse human forms, and we have genomes from an increasing number of them, allowing us to peer back to a time when humanity was much more variable than it is today.

The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.

We geneticists may be the barbarians coming late to the study of the human past, but it is always a bad idea to ignore barbarians.

As a society we should commit to according everyone equal rights despite the differences that exist among individuals. If we aspire to treat all individuals with respect regardless of the extraordinary differences that exist among individuals within a population, it should not be so much more of an effort to accommodate the smaller but still significant average differences across populations.

A great surprise that emerges from the genome revolution is that in the relatively recent past, human populations were just as different from each other as they are today, but that the fault lines across populations were almost unrecognizably different from today.

Prior to the genome revolution, I, like most others, had assumed that the big genetic clusters of populations we see today reflect the deep splits of the past. But in fact the big clusters today are themselves the result of mixtures of very different populations that existed earlier.

There was never a single trunk population in the human past. It has been mixtures all the way down.