The Invisible History of the Human Race (41 page)

Now that we can see so much more clearly what has been passed down to us, what will we choose to hold back, what will we send further down the line, and how will we pass that information on? We will do so in all the traditional ways, no doubt, but we also have one more method that is completely new. Noting that DNA is an extraordinary medium for the storage of high-density information, scientists have begun to explore its potential for use as a digital storage device. The first attempts to encode a trivial message with a few words in it took place at the end of the twentieth century; a decade later scientists were able to lay down complex stories in DNA, including Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, a scientific paper, and,
of course, Shakespeare’s sonnets. Rather ingeniously this new technique may yet add more layers to the palimpsest of DNA.

With admiration, thank you to Misha Angrist, Andrew Appleby, Tony Arthur, Gil Atzmon-Druze, Holly Choon Bachman, Barbara Barandun, Nola Beagley, Alan Bittles, Blaine Bettinger, Cinnamon Bloss, Sir Walter Bodmer, Baiying Borjigin, Jeff Carroll, Stanley Chang, George Church, Anna DiRienzo, Peter Donnelly, Eric Durand, Esther Dyson, Eran Elhaik, Eric Ehrenreich, Jim Ericson, Yaniv Erlich, Edward Farmer, Ellen Gunnarsdóttir, Marc Feldman, Cassandra Findlay, Jill Gaeiski, Ivy Getchell, Leanne Goss, Robert C. Green, Bennett Greenspan, Colin Groves, Helen Harris, John Hawks, Brenna Henn, Karla Hoff, Evan Imber-Black, Dan Jones, Turi King, Damian Labuda, David Allen Lambert, Andrei Lankov, Stephen Leslie, Donald MacLaren, Joe Mauch, Janet McCalman, Gavan McCarthy, Michael McCormick, Rhonda McClure, Glynis McHargue Patterson, Robert McLaren, Garry McLoughlin, Geoff Meyer, CeCe Moore, Joanna Mountain, David Murray, Leo Myers, Paul Nauta, David Noakes, Robert Noel, Nathan Nunn, Paul Nurse, Katy Oh, Peter Pan, Nick Patterson, Steven Pinker, Ugo Perego, Peter Ralph, David Reich, Mark Robinson, Thomas Robinson, Wendy Roth, Jacqueline Ross, Kevin Schurer, Richard Scott, Leonie Sheedy, Guido Tabellini, Shelly Tardashian, Jay Verkler, Nico Voightländer, Jennifer Wagner, Leonard Wantchekon, Bruce Whinney, Sloan Williams, Wayne Winkler, and Scott Woodward.

Special thanks to Gisela Heidenreich, Gudrun Sarkar, and Wolfgang
Gliebe.

Special thanks to Gisela Heidenreich, Gudrun Sarkar, and Wolfgang Gliebe.

Thank you to everyone who spoke to me off the record and without attribution.

Thank you to Debra Hine, without whom this would have taken years longer, and to Daniela Diedrich. Good luck with your PhD! Thank you, Eric Maisel.

Thank you, Razib Khan.

Thanks Gavan McCarthy for the Heinlein quote. Thank you, Helen Harris, for your brilliant expertise and special thanks to Alison Alexander for a delightful afternoon.

Thank you to the Abbotsford Convent and all who work there.

Thank you lovely Stephen Armstrong for an opportunity that made me think above and beyond.

Thank you to my far-flung writers groups, including Simon Caterson and Cordelia Fine. Thank you, Anne Baker and John Katinos, for your warm friendship and accommodation. You too, PP. Special thanks to Sheri Fink, Susan Cain, Monica Dux, Caleb Crain, Peter Terzian, Libba Bray, and Marci Alboher.

Amanda Schaffer, you are an inspiration, and I owe you one!

Shelagh Lloyd, you are kind and brilliant.

Thank you so much to everyone at Viking and William Morris Endeavor, including Francesca Belanger, Hilary Roberts, Nicholas Bromley, Hal Fessenden, Shannon Twomey, and especially to my editor, Rick Kot, and my agent, Jay Mandel.

Some of the words in the book have previously appeared in articles I wrote for the
Sunday Age
,
the
Good Weekend
,
the
Monthly
,
MIT Technology Review
, NewYorker.com, and other publications. My thanks to John van Tiggelen, Ben Naparstek, Mary-Anne Toy, Brian Bergstein, Jay Kang, and the other magazine editors who have engaged with this work.

Thanks as always, Nessie, for lending me your books.

Thanks for sharing your tree Bob and Eileen Jukes.

Thank you Damien Kenneally and Mary Kenneally.

Thank you Conrad Mackle, Angela Kenneally, Michael Jukes, and Allen Baldwin.

With deep gratitude to my mother and father and to Hugh, Katherine, Steve, Angie, Mick, Shelagh and Simon.

Three billion bases of thanks and love to Chris Baldwin, Nat, and Fin.

Author’s Note

“blurred, if not dissolved”:
McCormick further explains his approach in Jonathan Shaw, “Who Killed the Men of England?”
Harvard Magazine
, July–August 2009, available at http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/07/who-killed
-the-men-england.

Introduction

the QWERTY design
:
Jared Diamond popularized the problem of QWERTY, as he has many other issues of path-dependent history.

Chapter 1: Do Not Ask What Gets Passed Down

Genealogy, wrote
Guardian
columnist Zoe Williams
:
Z. Williams, “Ancestor Worship,”
Guardian
, November 8, 2006, available at http://www.the guardian.com/commentisfree/2006/nov/08/comment.zoewilliams.

“
Show me a genealogist”
:
S. Sanghera, “Every family has a story—but don’t tell me,”
Times
, April 7, 2010, available at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/sathnamsanghera/article2470220.ece.

Genealogy is Bunk
:
R. Conniff, “Genealogy is Bunk,”
Strange Behaviors
, July 1, 2007, available at http://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2007/07/01/genealogy-is-bunk/.

Richard Conniff
:
Despite his reservations, Conniff also acknowledged some of the pleasures of family history. He wrote that he would like to know more about his family name, which in Irish means, “son of a black hound.” He also confessed to a deep curiosity about his “Italian great-grandfather, who used to chase his father down Webster Avenue in the Bronx swinging a sickle and yelling, ‘I catch-a you, I keel-a you.’”

the Reverend Ephraim Newton
:
R. Lewontin, “Is There a Jewish Gene?”
New York Review of Books
, December 6, 2012, 59 (19).

“All the laws of Washington”
:
A. Clymer, “Strom Thurmond, Foe of Integration, Dies at 100,”
New York Times
, June 27, 2003, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/27/us/strom-thurmond-foe-of-integration
-dies-at-100.html.

“I was always the family record keeper”
:
Quotes from Wendy Roth in this chapter are from my interviews with her.

In 2012 Jordi Quoidbach
:
J. Quoidbach, D. T. Gilbert, and T. D. Wilson, “The End of History Illusion,
”
Science
339, no. 6115 (2013): 96–98.

the novelist Will Self
:
E. Day, “Will Self: I Don’t Write for Readers,”
Guard
ian
, August 5, 2012, available at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/05/will-self-umbrella-booker-interview.

A famous study compared
:
J. Henrich, S. J. Heine, and A. Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World?”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
33, no. 2–3 (2010): 61–83.

Chapter 2: The History of Family History

“not genealogists constitutionally”
:
F. Weil,
Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). I was greatly influenced by Weil’s book. It was a wonderful source as well as a window onto a body of work it would have otherwise taken me years to track down. Many of the examples in this chapter of the development of genealogy in America either came from it or pointed me toward fruitful further research.

“But they are not interested in genealogy”
:
Quotes from David Allen Lambert in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

Many modern genealogies
:
We don’t know how the much larger proportion of the population that wasn’t literate thought about family or tracked heritage at this time, but if they didn’t think about it at all, they would be one of the only groups who didn’t.

bourgeoisie adopted the practice
:
C. Klapisch-Zuber, “The Genesis of the Family Tree,”
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance
4 (1991): 105–29.

In an 1815 letter
:
F. Weil,
Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 42.

“product of tangled impulses”
:
F. Weil,
Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 4.

Michelle Obama’s family history
:
Initially traced up to five generations back on all branches by genealogist Megan Smolyenak.

“arguably the element”
:
F. Weil,
Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 2.

“These questions are not for publick information”
:
F. Weil,
Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 42.

“Our age is retrospective”
:
R. W. Emerson,
Nature
, 1856, available at: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/emerson/nature-emerson-a.html.

“When I talk with a genealogist”
:
F. Weil,
Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 47.

“excessively aristocratical”
:
F. Weil,
Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 81.

“
witnessed the emergence of the first generation”
:
F. Weil,
Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 158.

“Daniel Webster”
:
F. Weil,
Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 49.

Chapter 3: The Worst Idea in History

make a “stamp” on offspring
:
R. J. Wood, “The Sheep Breeders’ View of Heredity (1723–1843),” in
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference: A Cultural History of Heredity
(Berlin: Max Plank Institute, 2003).

“
Flying squarely in the face”
:
Breeders Gazette
, available at http://www.ans
.iastate.edu/history/faculty/bakewell/bakewell.html.

psychological traits being passed down
:
C. López Beltrán, “Heredity Old and New: French Physicians and L’hérédité naturelle in Early 19th Century,
”
in
A Cultural History of Heredity II: 18th and 19th Centuries
(Berlin: Max
-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, 2003), 7–19, available at http://search.wellcomelibrary.org/iii/mobile/record/C__Rb1748331__Sheredity__P0,10__Orightresult__X6.

eugenics could be a new religion
:
F. Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims,”
American Journal of Sociology
10, no. 1 (1904): 1–25.

moments in Grant’s intellectual development
:
J. Spiro,
Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant
(Burlington, VT: University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 2009).

“The African Pygmy”
:
J. Spiro,
Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant
(Burlington, VT: University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 2009), 46.

“The immigrant laborers”
:
M. Grant,
The Passing of the Great Race
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936 4th ed.), available at https://archive
.org/stream/passingofgreatra00granuoft/passingofgreatra00granuoft_djvu.txt.

“This is a practical, merciful and inevitable solution”
:
M. Grant,
The Passing of the Great Race
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936 4th ed.), available at https://archive.org/stream/passingofgreatra00granuoft/passingof
greatra00granuoft_djvu.txt.

“
The cross between a white man”
:
M. Grant,
The Passing of the Great Race
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936 4th ed.), available at https://archive
.org/stream/passingofgreatra00granuoft/passingofgreatra00granuoft
_djvu.txt.

The Passing of the Great Race
was his Bible
:
I found this story mentioned many times in articles and books but could not locate a definitively original source.

“the most valuable classes”
:
M. Grant,
The Passing of the Great Race
,
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936 4th ed.), available at https://
archive.org/stream/passingofgreatra00granuoft/passingofgreatra00granuoft
_djvu.txt.

“Pure + Pure”
:
Marriages-Fit and Unfit photograph, ID 11508, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory DNA Learning Center, available at http://www.dnalc.org/view/11508--Marriages-Fit-and-Unfit-.html.

the transmission of “defective strains”
:
American Breeders Magazine
3
(1912; reprint, London: Forgotten Books, 2013).

“determine the fate of our society”
:
Unless otherwise noted, all Popenoe quotes are from P. Popenoe and R. H. Johnson,
Applied Eugenics
(New York: Macmillan, 1918), p 341–49.

A 1925 book reviewer
:
“Whither Marriage?”
New York Times
, April 19, 1930, p. 85.

“the sacred thread of immortality”
:
P. Popenoe and R. H. Johnson,
Applied Eugenics
(New York: Macmillan, 1918), 351, available at http://hdl.handle
.net/1805/1042.

“From an historical point of view”
:
P. Popenoe and R. H. Johnson,
Applied Eugenics
(New York: Macmillan, 1918), 184, available at http://hdl.handle
.net/1805/1043.

before contracts were signed
:
Such detective agencies had been around since the 1890s. My main source for information on Japanese eugenics was
J. Robertson, “Blood Talks: Eugenic Modernity and the Creation of New Japanese,”
History and Anthropology
13, no. 3 (2002): 191–216.

Chapter 4: The Reich Genealogical Authority

“family in the service of
Rassen
”
:
Quotes from Joe Mauch in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

genealogists had significant social influence
:
E. Ehrenreich,
The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. xx and 234. Much of my history of genealogy in Nazi Germany comes from personal communications with Ehrenreich and from his book.

“effects of racial crossing”
:
This analysis and the following, including the observation about Darwin’s finches, come from V. Lipphardt, “Isolates and Crosses in Human Population Genetics; or, A Contextualization of German Race Science,”
Current Anthropology
53, no. S5 (2012): S69–S82.

“The line between promoting the idea”
:
E. Ehrenreich,
The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 48.

“by the time the Nazis assumed power”
:
E. Ehrenreich,
The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 45.

“Dogs and horses”
:
E. Ehrenreich,
The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 134.

“virtually dependent on one’s family chart”
:
B. Gausemeier, “Genealogy and Human Heredity in Germany, Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” 2011, available at http://wwwold.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/de/forschung/projects/DeptIII
-BerndGausemeier-GenealogyAndHumanHeredity.

“
While other branches of learning”
:
E. Ehrenreich,
The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 136.

“only one most holy human right”
:
Translated by Eric Ehrenreich and Daniela Diedrich. Ehrenreich showed me photographs of an Ahnenpass cover and the dedication on this inside page.

“No one knows my unbelievably heavy sorrow”
:
E. Ehrenreich,
The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 113.

“
You know, as a little child”
:
Quotes from Gisela Heidenreich in this chapter are from my interviews with her.

“My eyes aren’t perfect”
:
M. Landler, “Results of Secret Nazi Breeding Program: Ordinary Folks,”
New York Times
, November 7, 2006.

Chapter 5: Silence

“We weren’t allowed to talk to each other”
:
Quotes from Geoff Meyer in this chapter are from my interviews with him.