She Has Her Mother's Smile - Carl Zimmer

Sub-title: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

Zimmer is science writer and journalist. This book is a tome, 574 pages, a little large for late night reading.  The book spans a wide variety of topics related to inheritance and heredity.  A fascinating read with many details of the science of heredity to pursue further.  Reading this book got me to follow the author on Twitter. 

Passages I flagged:

[because the first diagrams of families evolved to be displayed as trees] "the French gave these pictures a name in honor of their forking shape: "pe de grue"  meaning "crane's foot."  In English, the word became pedigree.

"When viruses infect bacteria, they typically land on their victim and inject a string of DNA inside.  Many microbes can chop off the tip of this incoming DNA and insert it into a stretch of its own DNA, called a CRISPR region. (CRISPR is short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.)" 

"If you go back far enough in the history of a human population, you reach a point in time when all the individuals who have any descendants among living people are ancestors of all living people." [Yale mathematician Joseph Chang]

"For some reason, the hard bony case surrounding the inner ear was often rich with DNA, even when none could be found elsewhere in a skeleton".

[microchimerism] ..."most mothers experience [it].  ..research has revealed that all pregnant women have fetal cells in their bloodstream at thirty-six weeks.  After birth, the fraction drops, but up to half of mothers still carry fetal cells in their blood decades after carrying their children."

"..so called cumulative culture is a hallmark of our species.  Humans are constantly adding on to the practices they've learned, creating complex new forms of culture." 

Published: 2018  Read: August/September 2020  Genre: Historical Science