If all the people in the world going back to Adam and Eve went out and found a true outsider for a mate (putting aside the question of where the outsiders would come from), there would be far, far more people in the world than there are today. As Bill Bryson eloquently puts it in his excellent book “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” the explanation is incest, albeit at a discreet remove, for you really can’t put aside the question of the outsiders’ origins. Humans—and not just us southerners, thank you very much—have been marrying their cousins all along. Interesting news has been released about a study of DNA in modern Europeans. One of the interesting things about this and other similar studies is that they confirm what we already know. That in itself is interesting. The authors of this study do, however, feel as if they’ve managed to illustrate with more precision just how related we truly are: and we are very related! I am a fan of “pure science.” Someone will always step up and point out that money can and is foolishly spent studying apparent minutiae, but generally I think it’s worthwhile to spend money in an effort to know things: even it is only to confirm things we think we know.