Top 70 David Reich Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Tracing back fifty thousand years in the past, our genome is scattered into more than one hundred thousand ancestral stretches of DNA, greater than the number of people who lived in any population at that time, so we inherit DNA from nearly everyone in our ancestral population who had a substantial number of offspring at times that remote in the past.”

— David Reich

2. “Constant effort to struggle against our demons – against the social and behavioral habits that are built into our biology – is one of the ennobling behaviors of which we humans as a species are capable, and which has been critical to many of our triumphs and achievements.”

— David Reich

3. “I speak English, a language not spoken by my ancestors a hundred years ago.”

— David Reich

4. “As a society we should commit to according everyone equal rights despite the differences that exist among individuals. If we aspire to treat all individuals with respect regardless of the extraordinary differences that exist among individuals within a population, it should not be so much more of an effort to accommodate the smaller but still significant average differences across populations.”

— David Reich

5. “The genome revolution has shown that we are not living in particularly special times when viewed from the perspective of the great sweep of the human past. Mixtures of highly divergent groups have happened time and again, homogenizing populations just as divergent from one another as Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans.”

— David Reich

6. “We geneticists may be the barbarians coming late to the study of the human past, but it is always a bad idea to ignore barbarians.”

— David Reich

7. “Seventy thousand years ago, the world was populated by very diverse human forms, and we have genomes from an increasing number of them, allowing us to peer back to a time when humanity was much more variable than it is today.”

— David Reich

8. “There was never a single trunk population in the human past. It has been mixtures all the way down.”

— David Reich

9. “The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.”

— David Reich

10. “But “ancestry” is not a euphemism, nor is it synonymous with “race.” Instead, the term is born of an urgent need to come up with a precise language to discuss genetic differences among people at a time when scientific developments have finally provided the tools to detect them.”

— David Reich

11. “Prior to the genome revolution, I, like most others, had assumed that the big genetic clusters of populations we see today reflect the deep splits of the past. But in fact the big clusters today are themselves the result of mixtures of very different populations that existed earlier.”

— David Reich

12. “So how much Neanderthal ancestry do people outside of Africa carry today? We found that non-African genomes today are around 1.5 to 2.1 percent Neanderthal in origin,24 with the higher numbers in East Asians and the lower numbers in Europeans, despite the fact that Europe was the homeland of the Neanderthals.”

— David Reich

13. “Ten generations back, for example, the number of ancestral stretches of DNA is around 757 but the number of ancestors is 1,024, guaranteeing that each person has several hundred ancestors from whom he or she has received no DNA whatsoever.”

— David Reich

14. “A great surprise that emerges from the genome revolution is that in the relatively recent past, human populations were just as different from each other as they are today, but that the fault lines across populations were almost unrecognizably different from today.”

— David Reich

15. “The right way to deal with the inevitable discovery of substantial differences across populations is to realize that their existence should not affect the way we conduct ourselves. As a society we should commit to according everyone equal rights despite the differences that exist among individuals.”

— David Reich

16. “In the oldest text of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, the warrior god Indra rides against his impure enemies, or dasa, in a horse-drawn chariot, destroys their fortresses, or pur, and secures land and water for his people, the arya, or Aryans.1.”

— David Reich

17. “The Yamnaya – who the genetic data show were closely related to the source of the steppe ancestry in both India and Europe – are obvious candidates for spreading Indo-European languages to both these subcontinents of Eurasia.”

— David Reich

18. “The world’s earliest known figurine is a roughly forty-thousand-year-old “lion-man” carved from a woolly mammoth tusk, found in Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany.”

— David Reich

19. “To understand the power of the genome revolution for undermining old stereotypes about identity and building up a new basis for identity, consider how its finding of repeated mixture in human history has destroyed nearly every argument that used to be made for biologically based nationalism.”

— David Reich

20. “The genome bloggers’ political beliefs are fueled partly by the view that when it comes to discussion about biological differences across populations, the academics are not honoring the spirit of scientific truth-seeking.”

— David Reich

21. “People like those at Stonehenge were building great temples to their gods, and tombs for their dead, and could not have known that within a few hundred years their descendants would be gone and their lands overrun. The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.”

— David Reich

22. “Today there is an intricate caste system that shapes the lives of many people within Ethiopia, with elaborate rules preventing marriage between groups with different traditional roles.”

— David Reich

23. “It is also possible that in this period, individual women began to accumulate more power than they ever had before. Yet because it is biologically impossible for a woman, even a very powerful one, to have an extremely large number of children, the genetic effects of social inequality are much easier to detect on the male line.”

— David Reich

24. “To understand who we are, we need to approach the past with humility and with an open mind, and to be ready to change our minds out of respect for the power of hard data.”

— David Reich

25. “This is my model too: to build a factory, and then to commandeer it to answer deep questions about the past.”

— David Reich

26. “We scientists are conditioned by the system of research funding to justify what we do in terms of practical application to health or technology. But shouldn’t intrinsic curiosity be valued for itself?”

— David Reich

27. “It is an extraordinary example of how technology – in this case, domestication – contributed to homogenization, not just culturally but genetically. It shows that what is happening with the Industrial Revolution and the information revolution in our own time is not unique in the history of our species.”

— David Reich

28. “Evidence of early modern humans outside of Africa well before fifty thousand years ago includes the morphologically modern skeletons in Skhul and Qafzeh in present-day Israel that date to between around 130,000 to 100,000 years ago.”

— David Reich

29. “Writing now, I shudder to think of Watson, or of Wade, or their forebears, behind my shoulder. The history of science has revealed, again and again, the danger of trusting one’s instincts or of being led astray by one’s biases – of being too convinced that one knows the truth.”

— David Reich

30. “Could languages long extinct be recalled by unsealing a cave still reverberating with the echoes of words spoken there thousands of years ago?”

— David Reich

31. “Although they have not left unmixed descendants, the Ancient North Eurasians have in fact been extraordinarily successful. If we put together all the genetic material that they have contributed to present-day populations, they account for literally hundreds of millions of genomes’ worth of people.”

— David Reich

32. “But studies of pollen records in Denmark and elsewhere show that around this time, large parts of northern Europe were transformed from partial forest to grasslands, suggesting that the Corded Ware newcomers may have cut down forests, reengineered parts of the landscape to be more like the steppe, and carved out a niche for themselves that previous peoples of the region had never fully claimed.”

— David Reich

33. “The truth is that India is composed of a large number of small populations.”

— David Reich

34. “These numbers imply that the contribution of European American men to the genetic makeup of the present-day African American population is about four times that of European American women.”

— David Reich

35. “The avalanche of new data that has become available in the wake of the genome revolution has shown just how wrong the tree metaphor is for summarizing the relationship among modern human populations.”

— David Reich

36. “Since 2009, though, whole-genome data have begun to challenge long-held views in archaeology, history, anthropology, and even linguistics – and to resolve controversies in those fields.”

— David Reich

37. “All told, more than half the world’s population derives between 5 percent and 40 percent of their genomes from the Ancient North Eurasians.”

— David Reich

38. “A concern is that when members of groups are directly engaged in scientific investigation of their own history, people’s wish that certain things should be true often colors presentation of the findings.”

— David Reich

39. “For the great majority of traits, there is, as Lewontin said, much more variation within populations than across populations. This means that individuals with extreme high or low values of the great majority of traits can occur in any population. But it does not preclude the existence of subtler, average differences in traits across populations.”

— David Reich

40. “We now know that nearly every group living today is the product of repeated population mixtures that have occurred over thousands and tens of thousands of years. Mixing is in human nature, and no one population is – or could be – “pure.”

— David Reich

41. “The ancient DNA revolution documented that the first farmers even in the most remote reaches of Europe – Britain, Scandinavia, and Iberia – had very little hunter-gatherer-related ancestry.”

— David Reich

42. “Africa and the Near East had an effect akin to the erasing of a blackboard, creating a blank slate for the new people.”

— David Reich

43. “Mixture is fundamental to who we are, and we need to embrace it, not deny that it occurred.”

— David Reich

44. “He acknowledged that the reliance on racial and ethnic categories is useful given our poor present knowledge, but predicted that the future will involve testing individuals directly for what mutations they have, and doing away altogether with racial classification as a basis for making individualized decisions about care.”

— David Reich

45. “What will happen once we have genome-wide data from a thousand European farmers living shortly after the transition to agriculture? Comparing the results of a scan for recent natural selection in these individuals to the same scan performed in present-day Europeans should make it possible to understand whether the pace and nature of human adaptation has changed between preagricultural times and the time since the transition to agriculture.”

— David Reich

46. “Yet farming was not invented in India. Indian farming today is born of the collision of the two great agricultural systems of Eurasia.”

— David Reich

47. “Human history is full of dead ends, and we should not expect the people who lived in any one place in the past to be the direct ancestors of those who live there today.”

— David Reich

48. “Our history may not be as simple as the story of a dominant group that was immediately successful wherever it went.”

— David Reich

49. “Evidence of the antiquity of inequality should motivate us to deal in a more sophisticated way with it today, and to behave a little better in our own time.”

— David Reich

50. “Whether the original Indo-European speakers lived in the Near East or in eastern Europe, the Yamnaya, who were the main group responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across a vast span of the globe, were formed by mixture.”

— David Reich