<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The book "The 7 Daughters of Eve" lays out the genetic argument that
> 95% of all people of white european ancestry descended from 7 women
> who left africa and settled elsewhere, I think about 45,000 yrs ago.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393323145/sr=8-1/qid=1146324757/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-1423200-8312725?%5Fencoding=UTF8
Reviewer: D. B. Gibbons (Holladay, UT United States) - See all Many
scientists have things to say, but few know how to say them. The
Stephen Hawkings (A Brief History of Time) and Brian Fagans (Famines,
Floods and Emperors) of the world are rare creatures, indeed. In The
Seven Daughters of Eve Bryan Sykes proves he belongs in that small but
fortunate club.
This work is a remarkably well written narrative of Sykes' cutting
edge research into the ancestry of modern humans using mitochondrial
DNA. Unlike the DNA in the chromosomes of cell nuclei, which we
inherit from both of our parents, mitochondrial DNA is inherited only
from our mothers. It is also highly stable over time, which permits
geneticists to determine with almost mathematical certainty the
matrilineal genealogy of any human being on earth.
To students of history, prehistory, archaeology and linguistics the
conclusions he draws from his research are absolutely stunning. First,
he concludes that all modern humans (beyond reasonable mathematical
certainty) are descended from a single woman - Sykes calls her,
perhaps tongue in cheek, "Mitochondrial Eve." Second, every person on
earth is, in turn, the descendant of one of only 33 women, who were
the matrilineal descendants of "Eve." The book focuses on seven of
these women who are the matrilineal ancestors of virtually every
native European. These seven he calls, again perhaps tongue in cheek,
"The Daughters of Eve." Third, the oldest of the "daughters of Eve"
lived only about 45,000 years ago, the youngest within the past 10,000
years.
Some additional thoughts:
1. As with all knowledge, take this with a little grain of salt.
Today's axioms in science may be disproved or reevaluated in a month,
a year or a century. This is cutting edge stuff, and there are likely
many surprises to come.
2. Sykes is at his descriptive best when dealing with the fascinating
details of his own research and field work. His writing style breaks
down somewhat when he attempts to write imaginative Clan of the Cave
Bear-like chapters on the lives of the seven "daughters of Eve." I
skipped heavily in this section.
3. I am a little surprised to sense a commercial-like ambience on
Sykes' website, oxfordancestors.com. For a fee his organization will
test your DNA and tell you which "daughter of Eve" you are descended
from. This doesn't exactly lead me to doubt his research, but confirms
my suspicions that Sykes has many more skills as a writer and pitchman
than most of his colleagues.
4. Don't be misled by the title - this is not your standard Sunday
School or Bible Class religious tract. Those who believe that every
word of the Bible - through all of the twists and turns of 3,000 years
of copying, editing, compiling and translation - is infallible, will
perhaps find their faith challenged. On the other hand, those who are
not Bible literalists may find some edification here, as well.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Sykes Theories are Flawed, February 14, 2006
Reviewer: Tonya Payne "3d animator" - See all my reviews
The first few chapters of this book were interesting and I really
thought it was going to be a good book. It turned out to be a rather
dull book with theories that go against logic and scientific research.
First of all, Sykes drags out his personal struggles with other
researchers in the middle of the book, which is where it gets really
boring. I don't care about academic squabbles, I want to hear the
facts. I wanted to read about the seven women who all Europeans are
decended from. When I finally got to those chapters I was
disappointed. Seriously, it was Cave Man fiction. If you want early
human fiction, read Jean Auel. Basically, he made up stories about
what life might have been like for these women, and put in absolutely
no evidence from archaeologists or anthropologists to support his
theories.
Second of all, Sykes claims to be able to trace all of the migrations
of humanity through Mitochondrial DNA. This is utter nonsense.
Mitochondrial DNA, as Sykes admits, only traces one single line out of
thousands upon thousands of your ancestors. It only traces your
mother's mother's line. While Mitochondrial DNA can trace this line's
migrations, there are thousands of other lines out there, and we
cannot assume that the other ones followed the same migration route as
that maternal line. To assume such things is not scientific. For
example after ten generations you have a possible 1024 ancestors,
after twenty generations you have a possible 1,048,576 ancestors. Of
course some of these lines join back together, and so in reality you
have far fewer ancestors. The point is that you don't just have one
ancestor, everyone is probably decended from most of the people who
lived then. He also puts forth that because Native Americans are
decended from the Chinese that they all *must* have come to the
Americas across the Bering Land Bridge. There are a dozen reasons why
this theory is bull. What prevented them from crossing the sea? The
sea is probably far less dangerous than crossing a massive sheet of
ice. Also, he admits that 1% of Native Americans share a common
ancestor with modern Polynesians, but instead of drawing the obvious
conclusion, that these people sailed to the Americas, he insists
that's impossible. He believes that instead of them taking the
southern, warm route of following the ocean currents, that they sailed
north to the Arctic circle and followed the coast to the Americas.
They can apparently populate nearly every island in the Pacific Ocean,
but they couldn't make it to the Americas by sea. Here is where his
theory is really flawed as I stated above, and that is that he has
failed to take into account all of the other ancestors of the Native
Americans, not just that one maternal line. Their other thousands of
ancestors could have come from anywhere in the world, but currently we
have no means to trace that.
Modern people do not give early humans enough credit, and the
continued use of legitimate science to push for the re-acceptance of
outdated claims is annoying at best. Your grandmother may like this
book but for any serious student of Anthropology or Archaeology, I'd
stick to a book that puts forth facts and not fiction.
Was this review helpful to you? YesNo (Report this)
67 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
Sykes' secret, April 21, 2002
Reviewer: Steve Sailer (Chicago) - See all my reviews
Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes, author of The Seven Daughters Of Eve:
The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry just might have what it
takes to become another Carl Sagan or Louis Leakey - that rare
scientist with both the scientific skills and genius for
self-promotion needed to make himself a household name.
Sykes has many talents, as well as some useful vices. As this book
shows, he's a fine popular science writer. He also has a sizable ego
and a flair for self-dramatization that annoys other scientists but
appeals to the public. He often tends to portray himself in The Seven
Daughters as a Galileo single-handedly doing battle with the benighted
masses of anthropologists and geneticists like Stanford's
distinguished L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, who, according to Sykes' not
exactly neutral account, just didn't want to admit the importance of
his mitochondrial DNA research.
Most importantly, though, Sykes has grasped a simple fact about
population genetics that resounds emotionally with the average person,
yet has largely eluded most learned commentators. Namely, genes are
the stuff of genealogy. Each individual's genes are descended from
some people, but not from some other people. Thus, Sykes discovered,
people often feel a sense of family pride and loyalty to others,
living and dead, with whom they share some DNA.
Further, if you read between his lines, you can readily understand why
- despite all the propaganda that "race does not exist" - humanity
will never get over its obsession with race: Race is Family. A racial
group is an extremely extended family that is inbred to some degree.
In fact, people are so interested in tracing their family connections
that Sykes has gone into business for himself. He started a for-profit
firm OxfordAncestors.com. "Discover your ancestral mother," he
advertises. For [money] he'll trace your DNA (actually, a particular
set of your specialized mitochondrial DNA) back to one of the seven
Stone Age women who are the ancestors in the all-female line of 95% of
all white Europeans.
Sykes calls these "the Seven Daughters of Eve." (He's piggybacking on
the much-publicized concept of the primordial "Mitochondrial Eve" from
whom all women are supposedly descended.) One of his sales slogans:
"Which daughter was your ancestor?"
(If you happen to be from a non-European race, well, Sykes has got 27
other matrilineal clans sketchily worked out for you. Still, the
Eurocentric, cashocentric Sykes tends to treat those non-Caucasian
ancient mothers as if they were The Twenty-Seven Stepdaughters of Eve.)
Some scientists are appalled by Sykes' shameless entrepreneurialism.
Myself, I think that the self-effacing saints like the late William D.
Hamilton (the greatest theoretical biologist of the 20th Century and
the genius behind more famous biologists like Edward O. Wilson and
Richard Dawkins) and the attention-seekers like Sykes both serve
useful purposes in advancing science.
The key to Sykes' business is that within a particular set of stable
"junk DNA" in the mitochondrial code, mutations happen every 10,000
years on average. Last spring, in "Darwinophobia I," I explained why
junk genes are so useful to geneticists studying individual or racial
genealogies, yet so useless to the bodies they inhabit since they
don't do anything. But these genes' uselessness means they aren't
subject to Darwinian selection. So they are passed on unchanged,
except by random mutations.
Of course, precisely because population geneticists like Sykes and
Cavalli-Sforza study only useless genes that don't do anything, they
don't have anything credible to say about useful genes, like the ones
that influence IQ. To learn about nonjunk genes, you need to read
behavior geneticists like twin expert Nancy Segal or intelligence gene
finder Robert Plomin.
Without going into the technical details, a study of mitochondrial DNA
allows you to track the line of purely female descent in your
genealogy. This is the opposite of the "paternal line of descent" by
which your surname came down to you. (The male line can be tracked
through tests of the Y chromosome.) The maternal line is your mother's
mother's mother's etc. - all female, all the way back.
You can visualize your maternal line this way. Mentally lay out your
family tree, with you at the bottom. Place your father above you to
the left and your mother above you to the right. Fill in all your
grandparents, great-grandparents, and so forth, always keeping the
males to the left in each pair. Then, the matrilineal line of descent
is the extreme right edge of your family tree (just as your last name
comes from the extreme left edge).
Sykes has put together a chart of these functionally trivial but
genealogically interesting mutations that allow him to state, for
example, that the woman who claimed to be Anastasia Romanov (who was
portrayed by Ingrid Bergman in her Oscar-winning performance in
Anastasia) could not have been the daughter of the Czarina murdered by
Lenin.
(Of course, considering how many surviving members of the Romanov
extended family she fooled into thinking she was Anastasia, the
possibility remains that she might still have been some kind of
biological relative of the Romanovs. Perhaps she was fathered
illegitimately by a member of the Czar's side of the family. Neither
Sykes' matrilineal test, nor a Y chromosome patrilineal test can rule
that out.)
Sykes has identified seven mitochondrial mutations of particular
genealogical importance. Logically, for each mutation there existed an
individual woman.
Who were these seven women? They weren't the only women alive at the
time. They probably weren't even the first ones to be born with their
distinctive mutant junk gene. Each of the seven daughters is simply
the first after the appearance of their mutation to have a daughter
who had a daughter who had a daughter and on and on in an unbroken
line of female descent down to the present day. They are special only
in the rather arbitrary genealogical sense of each being on the
extreme right edge of the family tree of tens of millions of modern
Europeans.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Touches Literary Archetypes, February 7, 2006
Reviewer: Inchoatus.com "Inchoatus.com" (Greeley, CO United States) -
See all my reviews
There's a memorable line from Robinson's Fifty Degrees Below that
resonates because of Bryan Sykes. In the Robinson novel, some guys are
hanging out in a brutal winter in New York (how brutal is the point of
his book) and a black guy says:
"Man, I'm from Africa! I don't like this kind of cold!"
To this, one of the scientists, a white guy well-studied in
anthropology, responds:
"We're all from Africa."
You get this joke? Most people do. It's really a rather astonishing
thing that the idea that all of humanity stems from a small region in
Africa has so permeated our culture that a generally mainstream sci-fi
author can throw in this joke and most laypeople get it. We find this
astonishing because it's such a relatively recent shift in the popular
perception of where people come from.
Brian Sykes tells the story of how this happened. The Seven Daughters
of Eve is not a book describing the technical problems of measuring
DNA nor the hard science behind it-though it is there-the point of the
book is to tell about the journey of convincing the scientific
community-and the general community-of a truth that flies in the face
of so much prejudice and predisposition. It is a story about the calm,
inexorable, inoffensive victory of evidence and reason leading to a
new truth.
Sykes is an engaging writer-not a great writer-but certainly an
engaging one. He fills his book with clever witticisms and jokes that
pulls the reader along in spite of himself. Sykes is extremely
self-effacing about his own work, which helps because if he was a
boastful braggart it would have been insufferable to read about his
accomplishments, which are many and often contradict emotionally
beguiling myths (Kon-Tiki and Anastasia Romanov among them). Instead,
his light-hearted humility brings an idealistic perspective to the
scientific pursuit of truth.
Idealism is pretty important when you put this book in to context. It
is after nothing less than the parentage of all humanity. In terms
that Sykes acknowledges himself, his work is inspiring archetypes of
universal humanity and kinship. In proving that all people are united
in clans tracing back to single women-"clan mothers"-he brings
together and ties all of us into relationships. In a time where we're
inundated with Chinese horoscopes, Myers-Briggs personality profiles,
categories of mental orders and disorders, the first thing that most
people ask of Sykes and this book: who is my mother. Are you part of
my family? That all of Europe are united in one of only seven family
trees and, indeed, all humanity united with a few dozen, speaks to us
in a time when we're trying to set aside violent religious
differences, wrestle with notions of diversity and equality, and
individuals struggle against societal and cultural paradigms. There is
an irresistible and subtle pull surrounding Sykes' clan mothers and
their implications for us. It is definitive, scientific, mathematical
proof that we are all, in the end, one people. We are all from Africa.
The ability to trace the DNA history of our civilization-not to
mention putting to rest several anthropological mysteries that had
puzzled scientists for years-must be considered one of the great
achievements and discoveries within the least two decades. Learning
about this achievement is by itself worthwhile to read.
The book does have some curiosities.
One of the oddities of this book is that it plays with these
archetypes but devotes equal time to the evolution of Sykes' theory
and work in DNA. Really, what this means are a series of remembrances
regarding his early work, his colleagues, his conferences, his
relationship with the media, and the political struggle of changing
the mind of the scientific community. Because of Sykes' wit and
humility, this is genuinely engaging work... yet it mixes poorly with
the grand archetypes that he evokes: like mixing very good gin with
very good champagne, it doesn't blend very well. For a truly
enlightening and entertaining portrayal of the scientific mind, the
gold standard is still the autobiography, Surely You're Joking, Mr.
Feynman. Sykes' doesn't quite have the wit or the élan to match that work.
Then, suddenly, Sykes does a 180. In the latter half of the book,
Sykes commits himself entirely to his archetype and spends seven
chapters creating fictional biographies of the seven daughters. In
them, he speculates about the relationships with Neanderthals, the
domestication of dogs, and the invention of boats. It is, beyond any
doubt, as much speculative fiction as Clarke's ape-men approaching the
monolith in 2001, A Space Odyssey.
In seven chapters, he recounts the life of each of the clan mothers.
He remarks on several events: the creation of the first canoe, the
domestication of the first dog, and several other momentous events in
the ancient past that saw the rise of homo sapiens. What compels a
geneticist to embark-in fully one-half of his book-on such a flight of
fancy and speculation?
Well, what is science, in the end, but an attempt to discover truths
about ourselves. What is it that compels historians, genealogists, and
elementary school teachers assigning family trees to their students?
May as well ask why people read poetry. Despite the acknowledgment of
its total fiction, Sykes' clan mothers ring true somewhere deep within
us. As we read, we are incapable of resisting identification with one
or another. In the absence of one of Sykes' tests, we want to read and
say, "Yes, she's my mother."
It's really rather a remarkable read and a remarkable event. We're not
sure if Sykes' book will go down as one of the great scientific works
of decade... but at least it will be deeply affecting for those of us
who read it. Long after we forget the technical nuances of Sykes' work
in genetics, we will remember our clan mother.
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