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It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians (and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people) are carrying around is random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant.

Elizabeth Kolbert

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Elizabeth Kolbert
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: January 1
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
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The Bronx
New York City
Also
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Random
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African
Neanderthal
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Native
Neanderthals
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More quotes by Elizabeth Kolbert

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I did not mean to suggest that autism could be traced to Neanderthal genes. The point is that some genes that have been implicated in autism changed pretty significantly between the time Neanderthal line and human line split.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look carefully at the geological time, you can't find anything like us.
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People sometimes say we need to be really almost on a wartime footing if you want to change. Our whole economy is based on burning fossil fuels, which is taking CO2 out of the ground and putting it up into the air.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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You've got to do everything, everything's got to be pointing in the same direction and you've got to really turn this whole economic engine from one that's based on fossil fuels to one that isn't.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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Well in the scientific there is virtually no debate over certain things. For example, that we are changing the world. Humans are changing the world very radically, very dramatically. Climate change, which I assume is one of the points you're alluding to, is at the heart of this.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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As soon as you acknowledge that we're changing the planet on this scale, that it has very potentially massive repercussions and very damaging repercussions, then the next question is okay, what are we going to do about it?
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We can't say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been caused by glaciation event, one has been caused by a massive climate change, and one has been caused by an asteroid. These events turn out to have no precedent.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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When you drive to the grocery store, your intention is not to change the world, it just happens to have that impact. So we've done a lot of things without even realizing it, and yes, just being unusual, as you say, does not put you above, in a sense, any of the other organisms with whom we share this planet.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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If you're a conservation biologist in many fields, you're seeing your study subject disappear. People are in the position where they're chronicling radical decline, and that is not a position that conservation biologists want to be in.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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We have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to survive - as opposed to domesticated animals that we depend on. Would it radically change things if we had more rhinos in our midst? I kind of suspect it would.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes extinct.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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Some of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around the planet by people.
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If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign that something really serious is going on.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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In a poll commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents said they think that their children are spoiled.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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I traveled really to amazing places. I went to the Great Barrier Reef, I went to the Amazon, I went to the Andes, to try to bring people stories of sort of what's going on out in the world and bring this issue alive, in a way, and put it out there.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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I don't think there are too many places left that humans haven't pretty thoroughly explored.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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One of the reasons that people, many people, many environmentalists are critical of President [Barack] Obama's policies towards global warming is on the one hand he says the right things and he says he's committed to trying to reduce our current emissions.
Elizabeth Kolbert