Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1956-57
• Where—San Diego, California, USA
• Raised—eastern Washington State
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Awards—Science-in-Society Award (National Association of Science Writers)
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington, USA
Steve Olson is a US writer who specializes in science, mathematics, and public policy. He is the author of a number of nonfiction trade books and has written for numerous magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, Science, Scientific American, Wired, Yale Alumni Magazine, Washingtonian, Slate, and Paste. His articles have been reprinted in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003 and 2007.
Books
2002 - Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins
2004 - Count Down: Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World’s Toughest Math Competition
2010 - Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion... (with Greg Graffin)
2016 - Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens
Mapping Human History was a finalist for the National Book Awards and received the Science-in-Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers. Count Down was named a best science book of 2004 by Discover magazine.
Research on Ancestry
Mapping Human History contained a conjecture about human ancestry that was disputed when the book was published. The book claimed that the most recent common ancestor of everyone living on the Earth today must have lived just 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, a number that geneticists thought much too small.
However, a more formal version of the conjecture was proven by the author, working with coauthors Douglas Rohde and Joseph Chang, in a September 30, 2004, article in Nature. Using a model of the world’s landmasses and populations with moderate levels of migration, the authors calculated that the most recent common ancestor could have lived as recently as AD 55.
These results lead to some highly counterintuitive conclusions. In the generations before that of the most recent common ancestor, more and more people are common ancestors of everyone living on Earth today. At a time 2,000 to 3,000 years before the appearance of the most recent common ancestor, everyone in the world is either an ancestor of everyone living today or an ancestor of no one living today. Thus, everyone living today has exactly the same set of ancestors who lived 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, even though those ancestors are represented in very different proportions on a person’s family tree.
Da Vinci Code
In an article published in the Los Angeles Times on the day the movie The Da Vinci Code was released, Olson pointed to several other consequences of the analysis in the Nature paper. If Jesus has any descendants living in the world today, then almost everyone in the world is descended from Jesus. Furthermore, if a person living today has four or five grandchildren, so that his or her genealogical lineage is unlikely to go extinct within a few generations, that person is virtually guaranteed to be an ancestor of all humans in the Universe who will be living 2,000 to 3,000 years from now.
Personal
Olson is married to Lynn Olson, a long-time education journalist who is currently a senior program officer with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They have two children, Sarah and Eric. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/17/2016.)