Jon Entine

Jon Entine is an author, journalist, think tank scholar and business consultant. He writes a column (since 2001) for the British-based international magazine Ethical Corporation and contributes widely to newspapers and magazines around the world. He is a visiting fellow (since 2002) at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C. Entine is the founder of E.S.G.MediaMetrics, which offers sustainability consulting in environmental, social and governance areas, and he advises organizations on brand reputation and strategic communications.

Entine is known for his distinctive political identity, often taking contrarian or controversial points of views. He is a speaker at universities and civic organizations, and a guest on national news and political commentary television and radio shows in the United States and Europe.

Quotes by Jon Entine

"Cavalli-Sforza was also one of the first scientists to illustrate another key evolutionary force, the founder effect. It explains how genes in small, isolated populations can spread and even come to dominate a gene pool. To understand how this works in humans, think of thoroughbred horses, elephant seals, or cheetahs. Almost all thoroughbreds are descended from three late-sixteenth-century Arabian stallions imported to England from the Middle East. There is also little genetic variation in cheetahs, whose population had shrunk to almost nothing several thousand years ago. By 1890, the northern elephant seal had been hunted almost to extinction, dwindling in number to twenty or so. In each of these cases, the survivors, known as founder populations, subsequently thrived and carried in their genes the unique ancestral markers of their founders. Geneticists also call this the bottleneck effect--a shrinking of a population followed by a rapid expansion. While the survivors that supplied the genes to subsequent generations were not necessarily more genetically fit, they were luckier." - Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People pg 44.

"Y studies have also helped identify history's greatest Casanovas. In a sampling of more than two thousand men from across Asia, nearly 8 percent trace their ancestry to a prolific father who lived about eight hundred years ago. Historians believe the profile fits Genghis Khan, the thirteenth-centry "universal ruler" who united the fractious tribal Mongols notorious for sacking cities and forcibly taking women along the way. The Golden Family, as the clan came to be known, extended the empire across China, through Europe, and south to Mesopotamia. Khan's eldest son, Tushi, is reported to have had forty sons. Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan's grandson and the founder of the Yuan Dynasty in China, is known to have had twenty-two legitimate sons, and probably hundreds more, considering that dozens of virgin beauties were reportedly added to his harem each year. As many as 16 million men, one of every two hundred males on earth today, might trace their Y chromosome to this Mongol warrior, making him the world's most successful patriarch outside of Abraham. How certain are these findings? "The alternative explanation," said Christ Tyler-Smith, the lead researcher, "would be that, despite the historically recorded activities of Genghis Khan, his Y chromosome did not spread, but that of an unknown man living in the same place at the same time did, to an unprecedented extent. This seems less likely," the Oxford biochemist concluded dryly. - Ibid pg 59-60.

"Going back ten generations, we each have about one thousand ancestors (not considering marriages between cousins), which means we share about a millionth of a random neighbor's DNA by direct descent. Twenty-five generations ago, about the time when Columbus happened on the shores of the Americas, the number of our ancestral cousins swells to an astronomical 30 million, almost all of the world's populations at that time. Almost all of the people living today are distant cousins to a common ancestor who lived some three thousand or so years ago, geneticists estimate." - Ibid pg 61.

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