Spencer Wells Quotes

United States, Explorer
April 6, 1969

Rush Spencer Wells IV is a geneticist, anthropologist, author, entrepreneur, adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and owner of Antone's, an iconic nightclub in Austin, Texas. He co-hosts The Insight podcast with Razib Khan. Wells led The Genographic Project from 2005 to 2015, as an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society.

Taken with the archaeological data, we can say that the old hypothesis of an invasion of people - not merely their language - from the steppe appears to be true.

Spencer Wells
- People
- Language
- Data
Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes.

Spencer Wells
- Book
- Language
- Humans

So what we can answer as geneticists is questions about biology, about biological ancestry. But to make any sense of that historically we have to contextualize it - the archaeology, the linguistic pattern, even the climatology.

Spencer Wells
- Answers
- Patterns
- Biology
DNA ties us all together; we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back.

Spencer Wells
- Together
- Enough
- Share
Imagine you're copying a very long document, and occasionally you'll put an A where there should be a C. And that mistake has been translated down through the generations, and more mistakes have accumulated. So the longer the lineage has been in existence, the more mistakes the sequence is going to have.

Spencer Wells
- Long
- Mistake
- Imagine
We are all Africans under the skin.

Spencer Wells
- Skins
The greatest history book ever written is the one hidden in our DNA.

Spencer Wells
- Book
- Written