Christine Kenneally Quotes & Sayings

The history of the world may be writ in your cells, all of it personal to your lineage and some of it part of the broader context, but though you have been shaped by history, you have only been shaped by some of it. Fundamentally, — Christine Kenneally

It is well known that onset of the disease is affected by lifestyle, yet even when the at-risk subjects were given information about their susceptibility, many did not adjust their fat intake or increase exercise or consult medical specialists to minimize their risk. — Christine Kenneally

Language has to be partly innate, simply because human babies are born with the ability to learn the language of their parents. While this can justifiably be called a language instinct, there is no one gene compelling us to produce language. Instead, a set of genetic settings gives rise to a set of behaviors and perceptual and cognitive biases, some of which may be more general and others of which are more language specific. — Christine Kenneally

Some parts of the genome with a high frequency of Neanderthal variants shape hair and skin color and likely made the first Eurasians lighter-skinned than their African ancestors. — Christine Kenneally

It takes at least ten years for a child to learn to coordinate lips, tongue, mouth, and breath with the exacting fine motor control that adults use when they talk. — Christine Kenneally

not put in place, one wonders how insurance and pharmaceutical companies will treat our grandchildren if they have genetic information about them, perhaps even before they are even conceived. Insurance — Christine Kenneally

The world loses one of its six thousand languages every two weeks, and children have stopped learning half of the languages currently spoken in the world. It's been argued that languages are under greater threat than any endangered bird or mammal. — Christine Kenneally

In our evolutionary history some individuals must have been born with a greater inclination and ability to collaborate than our common ancestor with chimpanzees. These individuals were more successful and bred more offspring with those characteristics [...]. What we have evolved into now is a species for whom an experience means little if it's not shared. — Christine Kenneally

Because the light of evolution is not instantaneous or blinding, it is difficult to visualize the immensely slow and gradual change that is brought about by mutation and natural selection. When you consider a protozoan cell or an amphibian, on the one hand, and dolphins or, say, commuters, on the other, there is no intuitive way to make sense of the line that runs from one form of life to the next.

The popular cartoon of evolution, where the ape slowly unbends, straightens up, starts walking, and mutates into some form of modern-day human, is probably the easiest way to think about it. But [...] this caricature is misleading. Evolution does not follow the course of a single line. The tree of life bristles with stems, boughs, and branches. Most lines from one form to another are densely surrounded by branches leading to different species or dead ends. — Christine Kenneally

At the same time that Lahn's results were published, another team of scientists based at the University of California, San Diego, announced the discovery of a positively selected gene called SIGLEC11 that is expressed in brain cells called microglia. Although they can't yet explain the effects of the gene, it is interesting because it is one of the very few found only in humans and not in our ape cousins. This could make it a candidate for explaining some of the differences between us and them. — Christine Kenneally

You may discover that a certain sequence of letters in your autosomal DNA is typically found in someone with Finnish heritage or Korean ancestry. Only a few years ago the world of science was turned upside down when it was discovered that in ancient times two nonhuman species contributed to the human genome. — Christine Kenneally

The McEvoys, for their part, apparently had two dominant founding Y chromosomes, a theory that is supported by records revealing that when the name was anglicized, two ancient families, the Mac Fhiodhbhuidhes and the Mac an Bheathas, were drawn in under the same banner and both became McEvoys. History also indicates that fully three Irish surnames - McGuiness, Neeson, and McCreesh - are all anglicizations of the same Gaelic name Mac Aonghusa (son of Angus), which DNA evidence confirms, as all three groups overlap strongly on one Y. — Christine Kenneally

Here is where it becomes clear that this kind of fine-grained genetic history is the flip side of the family-history coin. Although genealogy is not widely valued in academia, it meshes perfectly with, and helps explain, social history. These small stories about individual lives reveal the way that individual choices shape the biology and the history of whole populations. — Christine Kenneally

Music, like the visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world," said Schwartz. "It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment." In music we hear the echo of our basic sound making instrument-the vocal tract. This explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras's mathematical equations: we like the sounds that are familiar to us-specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us. — Christine Kenneally

In the meantime, the works of Gordon, Lupyan, and others suggests that words are not just convenient labels for things; rather, they are extremely powerful mental devices. — Christine Kenneally

If every chunk of DNA were halved with every generation, the result would be a rather neat picture of proportionately shrinking segments that matched an expanding fan of cousins. But if the cut and shuffle of DNA down through the generations is not a smooth, even process and relatively large chunks of DNA may be passed on through generations more or less unchanged, it has some interesting implications for what DNA can tell us about the past. — Christine Kenneally

Language is unique in that there are no other animals with which we converse, no matter what language we are speaking. And yet the miracle of this research has been the realization that what is unique from one perspective may be constructed of mostly old parts from another. — Christine Kenneally

Language is the real information highway, the first virtual world. Language is the worldwide web, and everyone is logged on. — Christine Kenneally

There is evidence from ancient DNA that lighter skin, hair, and eye pigmentation was strongly selected for in Europe in just the last five thousand years. — Christine Kenneally

As a graduate student Nathan Nunn, now a Harvard economist, began to compare different economies in modern Africa, and he found that the countries that lost more people to the slave trade were also the poorest countries today. How — Christine Kenneally

At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work. — Christine Kenneally

This is because our personal genetic tree is not equivalent to our genealogical tree, which is to say that not every one of our direct ancestors has contributed to our genome. — Christine Kenneally

While all living things affect the evolution of other living things simply by virtue of trying to stay alive, humans interact with the biological evolution of other species in a much more complex and powerful fashion because of one ability: language. Nothing occurs on the human scale without language. No language means no agriculture, no animal farming, no science. — Christine Kenneally

It's clear by now that the problem of language evolution is completely intractable when you approach it from the perspective of a single discipline. For all the salient questions to be answered, the multidisciplinary nature of the field will have to become even more so. So far, it has taken years for individuals in different departments to start talking, to develop research questions that make sense for more than one narrow line of inquiry, and to start to understand one another's points of view. The field of language evolution needs students who can synthesize information from neuroscience, psychology, computer modeling, genetics, and linguistics. The more this happens, the richer and wider the field will become, instead of devolving around one or two theoretical issues. — Christine Kenneally

[I]t is almost impossible to talk about space without gesturing. Gesture is spontaneous, and is integral to individual expression as it is to communication. Even though you probably won't gesture as much if you are talking on the phone, you will still wave your arms about. Blind people gesture when they speak in the same way that seeing people do. — Christine Kenneally

The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place. — Christine Kenneally

Whether or not it's moral to let language extinction occur, it is the case that languages are irreplaceable records of the development of human societies and alternate windows into the human mind. When a language dies, we lose the knowledge that was encoded in it. Though we assume that when knowledge is lost, it has been superseded by a superior version, a dead language, with all its unique ways of carving up the world, is as irreplaceable as the dodo or the Tyrannosaurus rex. — Christine Kenneally

Today there are about six thousand languages in the world, and half of the world's population speaks only ten of them. English is the single most dominant of these ten. — Christine Kenneally

Most curious is the way that Y/surname patterns differ between countries. In Britain, on average, a man who has the same surname as another is significantly more likely to have a similar Y chromosome, and therefore a common ancestor, than he would with someone of a different surname. But there's a twist: The Y similarity depends on the frequency of the surname within the population. If you are a Smith, for example, the rule does not apply. — Christine Kenneally

But there is no agency in evolution; it is inadvertent. We survived, modified, and multiplied, just like any animal alive today, and out of the wildly dodgem course we took, language arose. — Christine Kenneally

The rules of syntax and intonation and words matured over time into the system we have today because they were progressively refined by use and the forge of survival and reproduction - not because the brain got big and complicated for some other reason, and all of a sudden we discovered we could now manipulate symbols as well. — Christine Kenneally

The human facility for perceiving speech begins very young: small babies have been shown to prefer the sounds of speech to nonspeech sounds. It is a fascinating paradox that humans can hear only up to fifteen different non-speech sounds per second, and beyond this they hear unremitting noise. Yet when they decode speech, they hear twenty to thirty distinct sounds per second. Somehow human speakers can pack, and in turn unpack, almost twice as many sounds if those sounds consist of consonants and vowels that are the components of the language they speak. — Christine Kenneally

In a 2006 study, the geneticist Jonathan Pritchard and his colleagues at the University of Chicago announced that there were at least seven hundred regions of the human genome that had clearly undergone positive selection in the last five thousand to fifteen thousand years. Some of the genes affect taste, smell, digestion, and brain function. It is thought that some of these changes resulted from the pressures involved in moving from a hunting-gathering lifestyle to a more agriculture based one. — Christine Kenneally

Language and material culture have greatly increased the mobility of the world's population, and some researchers believe that this will lead to an unhealthy and irreversible diminishing of variation in our genome. As more and more humans breed across the boundaries of genetic variation, we become a blander, more homogenous bunch than our diverse parent groups. This could be a problem because variation is important to the evolutionary health of a species, for the more we are the same, the easier it is for one single thing to make us extinct. Indeed, some genetic variants of the human species are disappearing altogether as small indigenous groups die out. — Christine Kenneally