Ajit Varki and Danny Brower Twelve, June 2013 Denial is not just a river in Africa, but the authors of this odd collaboration think it helped us cross one. Ajit Varki and the late Danny Brower acknowledge that our penchant for denying reality gets humans into constant trouble and could be the death of us; yet, they propose, without it we not only couldn’t survive—we would never have become fully human. How this book came to be is almost as unusual. Varki, a professor in UC San Diego’s School of Medicine, who found the first biochemical mutation distinguishing humans from chimps, was approached after a lecture by University of Arizona molecular biologist Brower, who shared his fascination with human origins. After Brower died suddenly, Varki ...
