Genealogy Books - The Seven Daughters of Eve

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Customer Rating:

Summary: excellent!
Comment: It was a wonderful reading. After many days I found this science book which was such an
easy-reading. Absolutely lucidly written. Sykes successfully blended his real experiences of
research (and its frustrations) and the science itself. He could have included more details on the
genetic history of the world population, but its also instructive to follow a selection of stories
(in this case the ancestry of Europeans). I liked this book extremely and encouraged many of my
friends to read this.

Customer Rating:

Summary: A Short Memoir About Bryan Sykes
Comment: I liked this book. Sykes butters his own biscuit quite a bit, but he does have a tale to tell.
It's always nice when a new technology comes along with hard data that puts an end to speculation.
Hard data such as that from mitochondrial DNA or from its cousin, the Y chromosome, can tell us
whether full or half Neanderthals are alive today (they're not). They can tell us whether
Polynesians came from Asia or from South America on a Thor Heyerdahl type watercraft (from Asia).
They can reveal to us whether is was truly the famous Russian tsar and his family found in a certain
grave; all murdered (it was). They reveal these things to us just as accurately as the DNA studies
that tell us both pomeranians and saint bernards came from wolves.

Sykes reveals his
story in a captivating fashion that builds suspense and manages to teach a few techniques in
experimental science at the same time. Perhaps I'm just easily entertained, but I also liked the
soap opera-like fiction at the end where he speculated about the lives of Europe's ancestors. I was
enjoying the book so much, I was disappointed when it was over - a must read for anyone with a
little interest in (or even tolerance for) science.

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Customer Rating:

Summary: The thing that bugged me the most about his book
Comment: His treatment of the Polynesians. What are they doing in the book supposed to be on Europeans. I
know others have written this on here but it's what I find so bad about it. Also, where is the
index?

Customer Rating:

Summary: A brilliant story almost ruined
Comment: Three-quarters of this book (ignoring, for the moment, the excruciating chapters 15 to 21)
constitute a brilliant account of the use of mitochondrial DNA for tracing the origins of humanity.
Now that it has become relatively easy to read the sequences of bases in DNA it might seem a simple
matter to use them to establish family relationships and trace ancestry. Unfortunately, however,
there is a huge complication, known as recombination, that makes this impossible for the
overwhelming majority of the DNA in the human organism. Nearly all of our DNA comes in two nearly
identical copies, and although half comes from each parent, the details get thoroughly mixed up in
each generation: it is as if, in copying out a book from beginning to end one were to use two
slightly different versions as a source, copying alternately from them, and switching between them
at unpredictable moments.

Fortunately, there are two small exceptions to this
generalization: every cell in the body contains small "organelles" known as mitochondria that are
responsible for energy production. These contain their own DNA that is maintained separately from
the rest, and it is passed exclusively through the maternal line, so even though nearly all the DNA
that an individual possesses comes equally from the two parents, the mitochondrial DNA comes only
from the mother. It does not gets mixed up at each generation, and apart from rare mutations it is
passed unchanged for many generations. The other exception is the Y chromosome, which males possess
and females do not: a small part of it does undergo recombination with DNA from the X chromosome,
but most of it does not, and is passed unchanged for many generations from father to son.
/>Brian Sykes has mainly worked with mitochondrial DNA, and most of his book is devoted to it,
though he does also mention the corresponding results with Y chromosomes. His major theme is that
about 95% of the native population of Europe has mitochondrial DNA that falls into seven easily
distinguishable sequences, and he interprets this to mean that almost every native European is
descended from one of seven different women. In the course of thousands of years mutations do
accumulate, slowly enough not to obliterate the ancestral signature, but fast enough to allow use of
the dispersion of sequences for estimating when the seven women lived -- up to 45000 years ago. This
date is recent enough to resolve a long-standing controversy about the relationship of modern humans
to the Neanderthals, because it agrees with the date when modern Cro-Magnon skulls appear in the
fossil record, and is much too recent to support any Neanderthal ancestry in the modern population.
At least so far as mitochondria (and hence the female line of descent) are concerned, the
Neanderthal people simply disappeared, leaving no modern descendants; they were not simply absorbed
into a mixed population.

This is the main theme, but the book also contains a number of
interesting sidelines, such as the use of mitochondrial DNA to show that a group of bodies in
shallow graves found near Yekatinerinburg in 1991 were almost certainly those of the last Tsar and
his family. Another is demonstration that the Polynesians must have originated in Asia -- probably
in Taiwan -- and not, as some anthropologists have maintained, in America.

The book is
also interesting as an illustration of how real scientists go about their work -- often without a
clear vision of where they are going, and sometimes with major new directions coming from pure
accidents. Sykes's investigation of Polynesian mitochondria started in just this way: what was
supposed have been a brief stop-over in the Pacific island of Rarotonga was converted into a stay of
several weeks after he crashed his rented motor-cycle into a tree and fractured his shoulder. During
his enforced stay on the island it occurred to him on an impulse to collect some blood samples from
the local hospital, and so on from there.

Albert Einstein said that when explaining
science everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. The first time that Sykes
referred to the mitochondrial DNA as "a gene" it could be taken as a piece of poor editing, but when
he said it again, very plainly -- "whatever way you look at it, mitochondrial DNA is only one gene"
-- it was clear that he had transgressed Einstein's line. Two pages later he makes the same error in
relation to the Y chromosome, though at least there he includes a half-hearted recognition that it
is not true. Fortunately, however, such lapses are relatively rare.

The title of the
book comes from the seven women deduced to be ancestors of 95% of native Europeans, and it refers to
a series of seven dreadful chapters near the end of the book in which Sykes writes fictional
biographies of these women. What on earth possessed him to write these stories? Did he wish he had
become a writer of popular romantic fiction rather than a scientist? Who knows, but the result is
embarrassingly awful. Without these chapters the book would be worth five stars; and even with them
a case for five stars could be made, as you lose nothing of importance if you just skip straight
from chapter 14 to chapter 22.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Some Interesting Parts, Some Ego, & Some Ridiculousness
Comment: Bryan Sykes's book, THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF EVE, seems to strike nothing but controversy. Both his
defenders and his detractors accuse him of a variety of things and, for the most part, they are all
true. Is his book well written? Yes, it is. I was extremely entertained while reading this book
and I do not think, as some have argued, that he fails to explain the science correctly. There is
nothing that is particularly challenging in this book and I believe that you can finish it in a
couple of sittings if you wanted. However, on the flip side, the book was a little too
"pop-science" for my tastes. I would have enjoyed more science and I think, if nothing else, we
deserve to have his opponents' views fleshed out in more detail. Sykes paints his opponents as if
they were ridiculous individuals, holding ridiculously unfounded views. As it stands now, Sykes
pulls you along under his lab coat, making you his very special cohort as he battles the ignorant
world of unbelievers (also known as the rest of the scientific community). The truth is, having
read some of the secondary literature on this relatively new science, that there is still quite a
controversy surrounding the issue of whether mitochondrial DNA can provide us the kind of "rough and
ready" answers that Sykes claims it does. However, you would never know there was any remaining
controversy after reading this book.

Like many readers, I too got tired of hearing
about Sykes's exploits. In his own mind, he simply cannot be wrong and he views the rest of the
scientific community as an unethical body lying in wait to tear down his theories. THE SEVEN
DAUGHTERS OF EVE also lacks a really coherent storyline tying the work together. Sykes's
essentially provides us with a chronological story about his journey into this new field of
research, but his storyline jumps around and flashes from event to event. Moreover, the final seven
chapters on each of the "seven daughters" are horrendous. These chapters are simply awful and give
a false impression of realism. In these chapters, Sykes imagines what the lives must have been like
for each of our genetic parents. Of course, Sykes was not there and no one has any sense of what
this ancient, pre-recorded history must have been like. But that does not seem to stop Sykes from
sewing a line of bull for each one. Finally, if you visit his website, you might be turned off (as
I was) by the moneymaking machine that he has created around his work. I guess you can't really
fault a guy for making a buck off of his research, but it still seems a bit tacky.

In
the end, I would recommend reading THE SEVEN DAUGHTERS OF EVE because it is an interesting premise:
What if we can trace our genetic roots back thousands of years in order to better understand our
roots? Sykes will keep you engaged throughout his solo journey and you will learn a lot in the
process. Just skip the seven chapters near the end in which Sykes imagines the lives of each of the
"seven daughters."

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