Steve Olson

Steve Olson is the author of Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), which was one of five finalists for the 2002 nonfiction National Book Award and received the Science-in-Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers.  His most recent book, Count Down: Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World’s Toughest Math Competition (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin), was named a best science book of 2004 by Discover magazine.  He has written several other books, includingEvolution in Hawaii and Biotechnology: An Industry Comes of Age.  He has been a consultant writer for the National Academy of Sciences and National Research Council, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the Institute for Genomic Research, and many other organizations.  He is the author of articles in The Atlantic Monthly, Science, Smithsonian,The Washington Post, Scientific American, Wired, The Yale Alumni Magazine, The Washingtonian, Slate, Teacher, Astronomy, Science 82-86, and other magazines.  In September 2004 he published with two coauthors an article in Nature that presented a fundamentally new perspective on human ancestry.  From 1989 through 1992 he served as Special Assistant for Communications in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.  He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Yale University in 1978.

Quotes by Steve Olson

    "Sometimes geneticists draw the relationships among human groups in the form of a tree, with Asians and Europeans branching off from Africans, American Indians branching off from Asians, and so on. But such trees are fundamentally misleading because they do not show the links among groups. Human groups are more like clouds forming, mergin, and dissipating on a hot summer day." Mapping Human History p.43   

   "The exponential growth in the number of our ancestors going back in time connects us tightly to the past. If a historical figure who lived more than 1,600 years ago had children who themselves had children, that person is almost certainly among our ancestors. Everyone in the world today is most likely descended from Nefertiti (through the six daughters she had with Akhenaton), from Confucius (through the son and daughter he is said to have had), and from Julius Caesar (through his illegitimate children, not through Julia, who died in childbirth). One need go back only a couple of millennia to connect everyone alive to a common pool of ancestors."
    "Being descended from someone doesn't necessarily mean that you have any DNA from that person. Essentially, the inheritance of DNA is weighted by numbers. If 800 years ago most of a person's ancestors were African and a few European, then most of that person's DNA comes from the African ancestors alive at that time. The amount of DNA each of us gets from any one of our 1,024 ancestors ten generations back is minuscule - and we might not get any DNA from that person, given the way the chromosomes rearrange themselves every generation. Still, the basic point is unchanged. The DNA now in our cells consists of bits and pieces of the DNA that was in thousands of people's cells a millennium or two ago. Our DNA is a patchwork quilt stitched together from the DNA of our ancestors." Ibid p.47

    "The forces of genetic mixing are so powerful that everyone in the world has Jewish ancestors, though the amount of DNA from those ancestors in a given individual may be small. In fact, everyone on earth is by now a descendant of Abraham, Moses, and Aaron - if indeed they existed." - Ibid p.114

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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