Why Race Is Not a Thing, According to Genetics
Scientists are unlocking the secrets to how we’re all related—to each other and to the species that came before us.
Today, scientists routinely map the genomes of the long dead, from Neanderthals to medieval kings. What they’re finding out, says British geneticist Adam Rutherford in A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, rewrites the story of human life on Earth—with some unexpected twists.
Speaking from the BBC studio in London where he hosts the weekly radio program Inside Science, Rutherford explains how the development of farming changed human biology; why the most important story our genes tell is that we are all family, despite race or tribe; and why it's not genes that turn people into mass shooters.
If you think of DNA simply as a data storage device, the data it stores is biological information. In us,
