Spencer Wells

Spencer Wells (born April 6, 1969 in Georgia, United States) is a geneticist and anthropologist, an Explorer-in-Residence  at the National Geographic Society, and Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professor at Cornell University. He leads The Genographic Project.

Quotes by Spencer Wells

"People contructing family trees are typically investigating events from the past few centuries, while population genetics starts there and pushes further into the past. Most of us have a sense of our family history, but eventually we all hit a brick wall. Our DNA breaks through that wall, providing a unifying path that leads from the present into the realm of deep ancestry." - Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project pg 13.

"Rather than belonging to discrete subspecies, humans are part of one big extended family." - Ibid pg 22.

   "One of the most tantalizing results to come out of the studies by Cavalli-Sforza and Lewontin was the finding that humans might be more closely related to each other than previously suspected. The tree derived by Cavalli-Sforza and Edwards, as with all family trees, traces back to a common source-that vertical line up at the top from which all of the other lines descend. And Lewontin showed that the genetic variation among human races was less than would have been expected if they had been diverging from each other for millions of years. The take-home message was that humans were all family."
   "What does this mean for everyone's concept of race? Of course humans come in a wide variety of colors, shapes, and sizes. Over the years these differences have been used to divide humanity. What the genetic data was saying, though, was that underneath the surface we are all much more closely related than we ever suspected." - Ibid pg 24.

"If you compare the same region of DNA from two completely unrelated people, you find that they are identical at 999 out of 1000 places in their nucleotide sequence. That's right--humans are 99.9 percent identical at the DNA level." - Ibid pg 40.

"It's interesting that R1a1 has such an abrupt drop in frequency as we move west into the forested regions of Europe--precisely what we would predict if the advantages conferred by horses were what allowed the clan to become so successful on the open grasslands. Consistent with this interpretation, R1a1 is also found throughout central Asia and down into northern India. It's possible that the early speakers of Indo-European languages (which include English, French, and the other languages of Europe, as well as those spoken in Iran and much of India) could have been R1a1 clan members, and their nomadic lifestyle could account for the spread of this lineage. The lack of a similar pattern on the femal side suggests that the conquest--a largely male-driven process since soldiers are typically men--could have contributed to the spread." - Ibid pg 77-78.

If you know of any other significant quotes by this person, please email me with the quote and source information if possible.

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