We are announcing you that Carles Lalueza-Fox, paleogeneticist and director of the Barcelona Museum of Natural Sciences, has just published the book Identity. What DNA can tell us about ourselves in one of the most prestigious science publishing houses in the world, MIT Press.
This book will be available in English bookstores from October 14th and can now be pre-ordered on the main publishing platforms such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Penguin Random House, Indigo, Books-a-Million and MIT Press Bookstorr. It is expected to be available in Spanish at the end of 2026.
If you want to understand how ancient DNA is forcing our hand—causing pre-genomic views of how each of us relates to the world around us to be untenable—this fascinating book by Carles Lalueza-Fox is for you.~David Reich, Professor, Harvard University; author of Who We Are and How We Got Here
Identity: What DNA Can Tell Us About Ourselves / Carles Lalueza-Fox. MIT Press. Massachusetts, USA, 2025. 176p. ISBN: 9780262553223.
Our identity, both personal and collective, is a fluid and complex narrative often rooted in the past. This past can now be explored with new technological developments; in the last few years, more than 10,000 ancient human genomes have been retrieved. At the same time, ancestry test companies are building conceptions on our identities based on genetic data from literally tens of millions of customers. Computational approaches are now able to generate pedigrees with millions of people across tens of generations.
In Identity, Carles Lalueza-Fox explores how the unprecedented amount of genetic information generated in the last ten years can provide meaningful and fascinating evidence about our identity, starting at the individual level and ending at the species level. As genetics takes center stage as a social transformation tool in the twenty-first century, this book helps explain the tremendous impact it will have on our concept of identity.