I guess I should have read more about what this book was about before actually reading it. I thought I was going to come away with some powerful arguments. Unfortunately, it was more like a thesis paper and what genetics do and don't say about us as people (from a race standpoint). it's not like you can rattle off your academic paper to someone who's calling you racist shitty names. ( )

There is no news here, but a fairly well-explained review of why human races are a socio-cultural phenomenon and why the genetic data that opponents to this theory cite are bogus. Similarly, the author makes short work of common moronic stereotypes and the armchair science factoids used to justify them. Due to my personal interests, I am usually fascinated by the mention of the genetic isopoint, and the author did not let me down. The genetic isopoint is the time when the entire population is the ancestor of all living people today. For Europe this was in the 10th century, i.e. all people in Europe in the 900’s who had descendants are ancestors of all Europeans alive today. The global isopoint was about 3400 years ago. This certainly throws most ancestry findings that my colleagues have bragged to me about into a cocked hat, and the next time you hear an argument about whether Hitler had Jewish ancestry you may respond that all Nazis have Jewish ancestry and that arguments of racial purity are just a fantasy. ( )

“Of course, racism is not simply wrong because it is based on scientifically specious ideas. Racism is wrong because it is an affront to human dignity. The rights of people and the respect that individuals are due by dint of being a person are not predicated on biology. They are human rights.” ( )

Racist pseudoscience may be on the rise, but science is no ally to racists. Instead science and history can be powerful allies against bigotry, granting us the clearest view of how people actually are, rather than how we judge them to be. HOW TO ARGUE WITH A RACIST dismantles outdated notions of race by illuminating what modern genetics can and can't tell us about human difference. It is a vital manifesto for a twenty-first century understanding of human evolution and variation, and a timely weapon against the misuse of science to justify racism.

The succinct answer to the title is, of course, "you don't!". Racists, just like flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, homeopaths and Trump supporters, are impervious to rational argument: they believe what they will believe and there is no doing anything about it.

This isn't a long book, but it doesn't take two hundred pages to state that obvious fact. Clearly, then, there's more to it than that. It's not a book about genetics either. Genetics is a relatively new science as slippery as quantum mechanics and with even less in the way 0f solid facts about it, so even a brief introduction to the subject can't really be managed in those two hundred pages. What it is, is a warning: a warning that should be in every school library and on every thinking person's bathroom bookshelf.

From the first time one Homo sapiens noticed that another Homo sapiens was different, having blue eyes or swarthy skin or whatever, humans have divided humans into groups, usually themselves on one side and various kinds of inferior 'Other' to be kept at a distance, made war on or taken into slavery. Public awareness of genetics, especially since the first publication of the human genome sequence, meant the racists pounced on a new weapon to distance themselves from the Other. Non-white were incapable of all sorts of things because of their genes. But a little learning is a very dangerous thing. If cutting edge geneticists have only vague ideas yet about what genes do what and what particular genes do individually or severally, then untrained racists are clueless and making it up as they go along. Besides, some simple GCSE maths leads straight to one of the more eyebrow-raising truths of this book: if each of us has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and so on, then going back to the Norman Conquest we each have over a trillon ancestors, about ten times more than all the humans that have ever existed. That's ten times the estimated human population of the whole world in 1066. Obviously they can't all be different individuals but even so, each of us either has a rich variety of heritage or is dangerously inbred. More alarmingly, anybody alive in Europe at that time who has any descendants living today is likely to be the ancestor of everybody living in Europe today. It gets stranger: go back to the height of the Roman Empire and you could probably say that about the whole world. But of course ultimately we are all of African descent.

Adam Rutherford is a geneticist by background and has a complicated family heritage along with first hand experience of overt racist, so one assumes he knows his subject. In recent years he's been one of the BBC's team of go-to science pundits and presents the Inside Science programme in Radio 4, where he is both informed and entertaining. Clearly he carries those skills through to his writing. This is a concise, readable and important book for our time. ( )