Jacob Lassner

A pretty fun and interesting read that will provide many people with a good overview of human evolutionary history, and natural and artificial selection. There won't be much new in here for anyone with a biology background, though the book is nicely structured in that it paints a nice clear picture of human evolution and movement out of Africa, things that you may know a bit about, but just distilled down and concentrated. There are also some interesting bits on the domestication of wild show more grains, and the genetic changes associated with that, which I wasn't previously aware of and found interesting.

There was a bit of a strange rant about the benefits of genetically modified foods at the end, and how we need to embrace them to feed the world. Basically, the author sets up a bit of a straw man argument that people's fear over scary health or ecological consequences of GMO crops is unfounded because people have been modifying the genetics of organisms for millennia through artificial selection. Which is a perfectly valid argument, but he does kind of side step talking about the problems with GMO that stem from huge multi-national companies having patents on the food that you grow, where they can introduce genetic sequences to sterilize their crops so you have to buy seed from them indefinitely, and all the problems associated with that. show less