The book by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending that I think I’ve mentioned before on NRO is now on general sale. It’s called The 10,000 Year Explosion, and is a first-rate popular account of evolutionary change as a factor in human history. It’s a great “ideas book.” As always with that kind of book, some of the ideas have better evidentiary foundations than others, but TTTYE is more conservative than most, with plenty of data and lucid explanations of tricky points in population genetics. (If you want the underlying math, Nowak’s your man.)

“The proper study of mankind is man.” We’re getting there. The deep history of homo sap. is one of those hypercomplex systems–like the earth’s climate, the national economy, the brain, or indeed the genome itself–that while in theory reducible to atoms and molecules bashing about, is better tackled from the other end, from the large-scale consequences of the bashing, via statistics and approximations, and with a resigned tolerance for occasional bursts of inexplicable chaos. Whether you’ll ever understand the whole thing is open to question. You just hope to understand a bit more this year than you did last year. Weather forecasts are still sometime wrong; but they’re way better than they were fifty years ago.