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Genomist @AdamRutherford is a gifted science communicator; the podcast he co-hosts, "The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry" is one of the best popular science programs I've ever heard: charming and informative at the same time.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07dx75g/episodes/downloads
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07dx75g/episodes/downloads
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His 2017 book "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived" used a survey of the state of the art in genomics to present an account of what we knew about human relatedness.
https://boingboing.net/2017/07/03/the-human-race-without-races.html
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https://boingboing.net/2017/07/03/the-human-race-without-races.html
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The most compelling part of "Brief History" was Rutherford's skewering of junk DNA sciecne, especially the home ancestry/genetic testing industry, with its claims of being able to tell you if you're 32% viking and if so, which red wine you're genetically programmed to enjoy.
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These sections are written with Rutherford's characteristic empathy - as someone who'd dedicated his life to genomics, he understands the impulse to connect your DNA with your life story - but they also warn about the harms arising from these false beliefs.
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These harms are the subject of his new book, HOW TO ARGUE WITH A RACIST, a bestseller in the UK, just published in the US with new forematter updated in light of both the pandemic and the #BLM uprising.
https://theexperimentpublishing.com/catalogs/spring-2020/how-to-argue-with-a-racist/
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https://theexperimentpublishing.com/catalogs/spring-2020/how-to-argue-with-a-racist/
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Superficially, the "race science" promulgated by white supremacists - often repeated by people who should know better, sometimes internalized by racialized people who are harmed by this pseudoscience - has the ring of plausibility.
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Whether that's the fairy tales about "race" and ability ("Jews are smart because of medieval money-lending laws" or "Black people perform well in sports because of the slave trade's selective breeding") or the studies grouping humanity into races based on genetic divergence.
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Chances are you've encountered this stuff and not known what to make of it but thought it benign or at least neutral. But sociologists have scraped white nationalist message-boards to document the centrality of this stuff to the rise of a new movement of would-be genociders.
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"How to Argue" is a point-by-point rebuttal to these race realists. Despite the title, Rutherford doesn't really expect that you'll convince someone who's obsessed with whether they have "Jewish genes" or who worships their ability to break down lactose with his arguments.
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Those people, after all, are motivated reasoners. They've started from the end-point - "appearances and life circumstances notwithstanding, I am superior and deserve better" - and worked their way backwards to justify that story to themselves.
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As Jonathan Swift wrote (and as Rutherford quotes): "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."
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But it's not just motivated reasoners who absorb this garbage. There's a whole business model built on selling people junk DNA science that makes "race science" regrettably spreadable.
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That's where Rutherford is aiming: people who've assumed that 23andme and its rivals wouldn't be able to make millions selling you diagnoses of the precise quantity of viking DNA in your blood if there wasn't something to it.
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And here Rutherford shines. He is, after all, a gifted science communicator. This is one seriously CHARMING book, funny and witty and just flat-out fascinating.
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Rutherford doesn't merely want to disabuse you of the fantastical claims of Junk DNA Science - he wants to excite you about the incredible NEW things we're learning thanks to the rapid advances in genomics.
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Like the fact that Africa is the most genetically diverse place on Earth, with two members of the Sen tribe from different regions being more genetically divergent than a Swede and an Australian Aboriginal person.
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And the fact that you only need to go back 11 generations before you reach an ancestor whose DNA is likely completely missing from your own genome. Or the small number of centuries you have to look back before you find the first common ancestor of every European.
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And the amount of genetic outflow and backflow between seemingly isolated places - Bronze Age Africa and Europe, say - and the waves of migration we can trace through genomes that eliminate any claim to national genetic commonality in any land.
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If you've ever wondered what role genomics plays in the dominance of people from east Africa in footraces, or the number of Jewish Nobelists, Rutherford's here for you, unpicking what we know about the role of genes in these attainments (spoiler: they're not that important).
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All leavened with gentle and devastating dunks on "race science" believers and the wit of Douglas Adams in his prime.
It may not help you win arguments with racists - they cannot be reasoned out of what they weren't reasoned into.
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It may not help you win arguments with racists - they cannot be reasoned out of what they weren't reasoned into.
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But it a powerful innoculant against the ideas drifting out of their foetid pits and into the rest of the world.
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