Better choices or to purge yourself from Sykes' work, I suggest you
read 'Mapping Human History' by Steve Olson or 'Genes Languages and People' by Luca Cavalli-Sforza.
Both give a balanced view of the field, are deeply referenced, and are easy reads.

Sykes'
mitochondrial DNA approach was not always honored or perhaps even fairly received; Sykes is probably
correct in feeling himself unfairly treated. However, there is too much "get back" in this book. It
is, however, a fast read and gives some good background in validating mtDNA as a reliable science.

On page 112, Sykes
claims that Darwin's book started crumbling Genesis as literal truth. How so? Genesis doesn't teach
against an ancient man! Sykes must be referring to the psuedoscientific young-earth creationism
beliefs of some. An accurate rendering of Genesis shows it supports an ancient man. See "The Genesis
Question" and "Creation and Time."

Truthfully, it was a good book. However, like some of the previous reviewers, I
was somewhat dissappointed by the author's rather storybook explanation of how he derived the
reliability of mitochondrial DNA as stable enough to use for genetic lineage research and dating.
All too frequently I found myself the reluctant witness to his professional shenanigans, rather than
the student endeavoring to learn more about this fascinating field.

He spent 13 chapters tracing
gossip and contentions with a former female colleague, and precious little time focusing on the
science that in theory made up his discussion. Then he chose to spend the last 10 chapters making
up, albeit accurately from an anthropological point of view, speculative stories on the so-called
daughters.

If you can live with his entirely too chatty and gossipy banter you can discover
underneath it all some small mitochondrial-sized kernel of knowledge. If you are looking for a more
traditional science tome however, this is not the way to go.

Sykes has many talents, as well as some useful vices. As this book shows, he's
a fine popular science writer. He also has a sizable ego and a flair for self-dramatization that
annoys other scientists but appeals to the public. He often tends to portray himself in The Seven
Daughters as a Galileo single-handedly doing battle with the benighted masses of anthropologists and
geneticists like Stanford's distinguished L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, who, according to Sykes' not exactly
neutral account, just didn't want to admit the importance of his mitochondrial DNA research.

Most
importantly, though, Sykes has grasped a simple fact about population genetics that resounds
emotionally with the average person, yet has largely eluded most learned commentators. Namely, genes
are the stuff of genealogy. Each individual's genes are descended from some people, but not from
some other people. Thus, Sykes discovered, people often feel a sense of family pride and loyalty to
others, living and dead, with whom they share some DNA.

Further, if you read between his lines,
you can readily understand why - despite all the propaganda that "race does not exist" - humanity
will never get over its obsession with race: Race is Family. A racial group is an extremely extended
family that is inbred to some degree.

In fact, people are so interested in tracing their family
connections that Sykes has gone into business for himself. He started a for-profit firm
OxfordAncestors.com. "Discover your ancestral mother," he advertises. For [money] he'll trace your
DNA (actually, a particular set of your specialized mitochondrial DNA) back to one of the seven
Stone Age women who are the ancestors in the all-female line of 95% of all white Europeans.

Sykes
calls these "the Seven Daughters of Eve." (He's piggybacking on the much-publicized concept of the
primordial "Mitochondrial Eve" from whom all women are supposedly descended.) One of his sales
slogans: "Which daughter was your ancestor?"

(If you happen to be from a non-European race, well,
Sykes has got 27 other matrilineal clans sketchily worked out for you. Still, the Eurocentric,
cashocentric Sykes tends to treat those non-Caucasian ancient mothers as if they were The
Twenty-Seven Stepdaughters of Eve.)

Some scientists are appalled by Sykes' shameless
entrepreneurialism. Myself, I think that the self-effacing saints like the late William D. Hamilton
(the greatest theoretical biologist of the 20th Century and the genius behind more famous biologists
like Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins) and the attention-seekers like Sykes both serve useful
purposes in advancing science.

The key to Sykes' business is that within a particular set of
stable "junk DNA" in the mitochondrial code, mutations happen every 10,000 years on average. Last
spring, in "Darwinophobia I," I explained why junk genes are so useful to geneticists studying
individual or racial genealogies, yet so useless to the bodies they inhabit since they don't do
anything. But these genes' uselessness means they aren't subject to Darwinian selection. So they are
passed on unchanged, except by random mutations.

Of course, precisely because population
geneticists like Sykes and Cavalli-Sforza study only useless genes that don't do anything, they
don't have anything credible to say about useful genes, like the ones that influence IQ. To learn
about nonjunk genes, you need to read behavior geneticists like twin expert Nancy Segal or
intelligence gene finder Robert Plomin.

Without going into the technical details, a study of
mitochondrial DNA allows you to track the line of purely female descent in your genealogy. This is
the opposite of the "paternal line of descent" by which your surname came down to you. (The male
line can be tracked through tests of the Y chromosome.) The maternal line is your mother's mother's
mother's etc. - all female, all the way back.

You can visualize your maternal line this way.
Mentally lay out your family tree, with you at the bottom. Place your father above you to the left
and your mother above you to the right. Fill in all your grandparents, great-grandparents, and so
forth, always keeping the males to the left in each pair. Then, the matrilineal line of descent is
the extreme right edge of your family tree (just as your last name comes from the extreme left
edge).

Sykes has put together a chart of these functionally trivial but genealogically
interesting mutations that allow him to state, for example, that the woman who claimed to be
Anastasia Romanov (who was portrayed by Ingrid Bergman in her Oscar-winning performance in
Anastasia) could not have been the daughter of the Czarina murdered by Lenin.

(Of course,
considering how many surviving members of the Romanov extended family she fooled into thinking she
was Anastasia, the possibility remains that she might still have been some kind of biological
relative of the Romanovs. Perhaps she was fathered illegitimately by a member of the Czar's side of
the family. Neither Sykes' matrilineal test, nor a Y chromosome patrilineal test can rule that out.)

Sykes has identified seven mitochondrial mutations of particular genealogical importance.
Logically, for each mutation there existed an individual woman.

Who were these seven women? They
weren't the only women alive at the time. They probably weren't even the first ones to be born with
their distinctive mutant junk gene. Each of the seven daughters is simply the first after the
appearance of their mutation to have a daughter who had a daughter who had a daughter and on and on
in an unbroken line of female descent down to the present day. They are special only in the rather
arbitrary genealogical sense of each being on the extreme right edge of the family tree of tens of
millions of modern Europeans.