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“They will not be pleased. But they know we must catch the monsoon with a well-found ship; and they know they are in the Navy--they have chosen their cake, and must lie on it.'
You mean, they cannot have their bed and eat it.'
No, no, it is not quite that either. I mean--I wish you would not confuse my mind, Stephen.”
― Patrick O'Brian, H.M.S. Surprise

“The problem with racial discrimination, though, is not the inference of a person's race from their genetic characteristics. It is quite the opposite: it is the inference of a person's characteristics from their race. The question is not, can you, given an individual's skin color, hair texture, or language, infer something about their ancestry or origin. That is a question of biological systematics -- of lineage, taxonomy, of racial geography, of biological discrimination. Of course you can -- and genomics as vastly refined that inference. You can scan any individual genome and infer rather deep insights about a person's ancestry, or place of origin. But the vastly more controversial question is the converse: Given a racial identity -- African or Asian, say -- can you infer anything about an individual's characteristics: not just skin or hair color, but more complex features, such as intelligence, habits, personality, and aptitude? /I/ Genes can certainly tell us about race, but can race tell us anything about genes? /i/

To answer this question, we need to measure how genetic variation is distributed across various racial categories. Is there more diversity _within_ races or _between_ races? Does knowing that someone is of African versus European descent, say, allow us to refine our understanding of their genetic traits, or their personal, physical, or intellectual attributes in a meaningful manner? Or is there so much variation within Africans and Europeans that _intraracial_ diversity dominates the comparison, thereby making the category "African" or "European" moot?

We now know precise and quantitative answers to these questions. A number of studies have tried to quantify the level of genetic diversity of the human genome. The most recent estimates suggest that the vast proportion of genetic diversity (85 to 90 percent) occurs _within_ so-called races (i.e., within Asians or Africans) and only a minor proportion (7 percent) within racial groups (the geneticist Richard Lewontin had estimated a similar distribution as early as 1972). Some genes certainly vary sharply between racial or ethnic groups -- sickle-cell anemia is an Afro-Caribbean and Indian disease, and Tay-Sachs disease has a much higher frequency in Ashkenazi Jews -- but for the most part, the genetic diversity within any racial group dominates the diversity between racial groups -- not marginally, but by an enormous amount. The degree of interracial variability makes "race" a poor surrogate for nearly any feature: in a genetic sense, an African man from Nigria is so "different" from another man from Namibia that it makes little sense to lump them into the same category.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“Two weevils crept from the crumbs. 'You see those weevils, Stephen?' said Jack solemnly.

I do.'

Which would you choose?'

There is not a scrap of difference. Arcades ambo. They are the same species of curculio, and there is nothing to choose between them.'

But suppose you had to choose?'

Then I should choose the right-hand weevil; it has a perceptible advantage in both length and breadth.'

There I have you,' cried Jack. 'You are bit - you are completely dished. Don't you know that in the Navy you must always choose the lesser of two weevils? Oh ha, ha, ha, ha!”
― Patrick O'Brian

“This was the big advantage of “Oriental�� campaign excavations: whereas in Europe they were forced by their budgets to dig them selves, archaeologists in Syria, like their glorious predecessors, could delegate the lowly tasks. As Bilger said, quoting The Good, the Bad and the Ugly��: “you see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig.�� So the European archaeologists had acquired an extremely specialized and technical Arabic vocabulary: dig here, clear there, with a shovel, a pickax, a small pick, a trowel �� the brush was the privilege of Westerners. Dig gently, clear quickly, and it was not rare to overhear the following dialogue:
“Go one meter down here.��
“Yes boss. With an excavation shovel?��
“Um, big shovel�� Big shovel no. Instead pickax.��
“With the big pickax?��
“Big pickax no. Little pick.��
“So, we should dig down to  one meter with the little pick?��
“Na’am, na’am. Shwia shwia, Listen, don’t go smashing in the whole world to finish more quickly, OK?��
In these circumstances there were obviously misunderstandings that led to irreparable losses for science: a number of walls and stylobates fell victim to the perverse alliance of linguistics and capitalism, but on the whole the archaeologists were happy with their personnel, whom they trained, so to speak, season after season....[I am] curious to know what these excavations represent, for these workers. Do they have the feeling that we are stripping them of their history, that Europeans are stealing something from them, once again?
Bilger had a theory: he argued that for these workmen whatever came before Islam does not belong to them, is of another order, another world, which falls into the category of the qadim jiddan, the “very old��; Bilger asserted that for a Syrian, the history of the world is divided into three periods: jadid, recent; qadim, old; qadim jiddan, very old, without it being very clear if it was simply his own level of Arabic that was the cause for such a simplification: even if his workers talked to him about the succession of Mesopotamian dynasties, they would have had to resort, lacking a common language that he could understand, to the qadim jiddan. ”
― Mathias Énard, Compass