But then a writer who suggests his book is a continuation of Steve Jones’s masterpiece The Language of Genes is clearly not short of confidence. Imagine if Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were updated with the addendum “as told by genes” and you’d get a sense of the scale of the ambition. In untangling this mesh, Rutherford aims at no less than a retelling of human history. Family trees, it seems, collapse and fold in they zigzag across generations to produce a bewilderingly entangled mesh. If you take the notion that you have two parents, that they each also had two parents, and work backwards to an ever expanding family tree, then by the time you reach the eighth century and Charlemagne you will have accounted for 137,438,953,472 individuals, more people than have ever existed in total on the planet.
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