Author: Adam Rutherford

How to Argue With a Racist is short by design, a handbook rather than a history, and it works through four claims that keep recurring in public argument: about skin colour, about ancestry, about sport, and about intelligence. Adam Rutherford answers each with population genetics, and the answer is generally that the science does not support the claim and never did. Weidenfeld and Nicolson published it in 2020. Rutherford took a doctorate in genetics at University College London, worked as an editor at Nature, and has presented Inside Science on BBC Radio 4 for years. His other books include A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived and Control, a study of eugenics and its long afterlife. He writes as a geneticist correcting a factual record rather than as a moralist, and that is the reason the book is often handed to people who would not read a different sort of argument.