2011 Random Read #2...IT'S SCIENCE!

When I read a good nonfiction book it turns me on to reading more of the like. That was the case with The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science which I read a finished a few days ago. After finishing that book my eyes began scanning my shelves of unread books, searching for something to fill the need for more fascinating science, and I settled on this book, The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry. The author is Brian Sykes, a professor of genetics at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at the prestigious Oxford University, so he clearly knows his stuff.

It is about the breakthroughs Professor Sykes and his colleagues made in Mitochondrial DNA extraction and sequencing, and their discovery that through said mitochondrial DNA they could trace all of modern man back to their distant ancestors, anywhere from 10,000 to 45,000 yrs through the maternal line because mitochondrial DNA is only passed on through ones mother without any modification from the father's DNA.

Throughout their scientific journey they also settle some long standing fueds in the academic community about the origins of modern man, such as where the original Polynesian's came from, southern Asia of the Americas, and whether all modern man are the descendants of Cro-Magnon man or a hybrid of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal.

Most of the book was intensely fascinating, but that last third of the book, when Sykes describes the lives of the 'Seven Daughters', the ancestral mothers of all modern Europeans, I found it, for lack of a better word, boring. That is because it was all pure speculation, Sykes even says so not once but twice, and after 200 pages of hard scientific facts it felt very out of place.

All said, I would recommend this book to anyone with a thirsty mind for any type of science, with the caveat that they may or may not enjoy the last 90 or so pages as much.