Adam Rutherford > Quotes

“When you have only ever experienced privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
― Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

“Race is real because we perceive it. Racism is real because we enact it. Neither race nor racism has foundations in science. It is our duty to contest the warping of scientific research, especially if it is being used to justify prejudice. If you are a racist, then you are asking for a fight. But science is my ally, not yours, and your fight is not just with me, but with reality.”
― Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

“And then there are huge chunks of DNA that are just repeated sections. And then there are huge chunks of DNA that are just repeated sections. And then there are huge chunks of DNA that are just repeated sections.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“We look to statistics for reassurance in these types of situations. Here is one: 100% of mass shootings have been enabled by access to guns. I can guarantee that even if there were a genotype shared by the mass shooters, which there will not be, none of the killings would have happened if they didn't have guns.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“When all you’ve ever known is privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
― Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

“We sometimes forget that though the data should be pure and straightforward, science is done by people, who are never either.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“none of the ways in which we talk about race today stands up to the scrutiny that genetics has enabled. Families are too untidy, human history is too convoluted, people too motile. The deck has been shuffled and reshuffled. Genetics has shown that people are different, and these differences cluster according to geography and culture, but never in a way that aligns with the traditional concepts of human races.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“Alas, we are no more or less evolved than any creature. Uniqueness is terribly overrated.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“Nevertheless, every Nazi has Jewish ancestors. Every white supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, Chinese, Native American, aboriginal Australian ancestors, as well as everyone else, and not just in the sense that humankind is an African species in deep prehistory, but at a minimum from classical times, and probably much more recently. Racial purity is a pure fantasy. For humans, there are no purebloods, only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes.”
― Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

“Race is a social construct. This does not mean that it is invalid or unimportant.”
― Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

“Scientific racism’ or ‘race science’ are both misnomers. These are pseudoscientific domains.”
― Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

“Nature is not cruel, it is simply indifferent,”
― Adam Rutherford, The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War, and the Evolution of Us: How Homo sapiens Became Nature’s Most Paradoxical Creature―A New Evolutionary History

“In the words of Dr. Seuss: Today you are you! That is truer than true!
There is no one alive who is you-er than you!”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“Everyone alive in the tenth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne, and his children Drogo, Pippin and, of course, not forgetting Hugh. If”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“Genetics is messy and mathematical, but powerful if deployed in the right way. People are horny. Lives are complex. A secret history is truly hidden in the mosaics of our genomes, but caveat emptor. No”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“Evolution, blind and slow, has not inched along over billions of years with any intention that it should be decipherable to one or any of its billions of children.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

“demonstrates quite clearly Swift’s maxim that you cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.”
― Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

“As Jonathan Swift said in 1721: ‘Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.”
― Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

“Except if you’re of European descent. Your lactase continues to work throughout your life. This unusual phenomenon is called lactase persistence, and although a splash of milk in tea is the English way, and even a mug of hot chocolate might seem very normal to us, we are the weird ones.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“Almost all science is done by very normal people”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“Are we slaves or masters of our genes? We are neither, and it’s a dumb, simplistic question.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“In the penultimate stages of writing this book, the date of the great exodus from Africa may have shifted more than 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, following the discovery of forty-seven modern teeth in China. Then in the final stages it moved back by another 20,000 years with the detection of Homo sapiens DNA in a millennia-dead Neanderthal girl. These numbers are not much in evolutionary terms, ripples in geological time. But that is much more than the whole of written human history, and so the land continually and dramatically moves under our feet.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“It behoves us all to confront racism wherever we find it, especially when it is covert or normalised in stereotypes and myth, and science is a weapon in that contest. The academic and political activist Angela Davis said that ‘in a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”
― Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

“Mind you, Darwin fretted about a lot of stuff, especially his health, his kids, and maybe with just cause. On occasion he would write a fit of histrionic despair, such as “I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything,”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge . . . says Darwin in The Descent of Man, his”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“As a species, all the things we do are unique, and are also seen all over the natural world.”
― Adam Rutherford, The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War, and the Evolution of Us: How Homo sapiens Became Nature’s Most Paradoxical Creature―A New Evolutionary History

“it’s hard to see what the evolutionary advantage might be for lactase persistence in the absence of a regular supply of fresh milk. And so we think of this as a classic example of how we have invoked shifts in our genome with our own practices—a gene-culture coevolution—experienced only in communities that were practicing dairy farming with domesticated milky beasts. What advantage having both access to milk and the ability to process it might seem obvious: In fact, it’s really the realm of intelligent but speculative guesswork. A regular supply of nutritionally rich food is one; avoiding the boom and bust cycles of seasonal crops is another possibility. By 6,000 years ago, milk had become a part of Neolithic life.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

“The nineteenth-century abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker said that the moral arc of the world tends towards justice,”
― Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

“For humans, there are no purebloods, only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes.”
― Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

“Furthermore, some researchers have suggested a strong association with the presence of the protective gene in populations who have historically farmed yams. To plant yams, farmers clear forests. Cleared forest means more standing water. More standing water means more mosquitoes. More mosquitoes means more malaria—so the idea goes. The emergence of the disease, and as a consequence the resistance gene, may well have been enabled, or at least nurtured, by yam farming. The persistence of sickle cell anemia is the cost of positive selection for resistance against the most destructive disease in our history.”
― Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes