An Entirely Unexpected Finding

Re: Denis J. Murphy's 2007 "People, Plants, and Genes"

In my last (short) post, I made a few remarks about an evident writing labor-of-love, the plant geneticist Denis J. Murphy’s thorough and extremely well-written and illustrated review of the co-evolution of humans, climate, and plants — and the directly consequent natures of human societies and health.

It turns out that Murphy has posted a free, downloadable pdf copy of this 2007 book on Researchgate. The download address for the entire book is: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285992992_People_Plants_and_Genes_The_Story_of_Crops_and_Humanity.

Also, I finally finished reading David Reich’s 2019 “Who We Are and How We Got Here — Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past”. Overall, Reich shows quite a lot of enthusiasm for the data-mining work he does and presents it quite well, but I suspect at least some of his conclusions and judgments are scientifically premature, inasmuch as most of his (and other’s) interpretations of the newly available whole human genome data are based on the root and not proven assumption that human germ line mutation rates are more or less constant over time and in space. See, this for an example of an expression of scientific doubt about this particular matter. The extremely heavy use of this basic assumption by Reich and others suggests the subtitle of the book might have been more cautiously and fittingly written, “Ancient DNA and a New Working Hypothesis of the Human Past”.

Note that I found much of the near-final Chapter 11 of Reich’s book (The genomics of race and identity), petty, mean-spirited, and something of, as is often said lately, a “word salad”. This “meow” chapter detracts much from the otherwise neutral scientific nature of his exposition.