Rethink everything we know about genes and identity politics | Adam Rutherford | TEDxGlasgow

Genetics is merely the formal scientific study of sex and inheritance. Genetics is – at best – a science only a century old, we’ve only really begun to get a grasp on how DNA relates to how and who we are in the last 10 years. We’ve been thinking about sex and inheritance for ten thousand years. What this means is that there is a lot of cultural baggage that people carry when it comes to the ideas that genetics is beginning to unpick scientifically. And most of them are wrong.

DNA will not tell you who you are, what tribe you belong to or what country your ancestors came from. Your genes will not reveal whether you are gay or straight, who you will fancy, what foods you should eat, how smart you are, nor how you will die. We’re in a golden age for the science of genetics, but the advent of cheap consumer genomic testing kits – for everything from ancestry to wine preference to skin cream to sporting advice – is hampering the progress we should be making towards a greater public understanding of how DNA is part of our lives. The kits play to our cultural prejudices and base desires for simple answers to complex questions, from the trivial – everyone wants to be a Viking – to the profoundly pernicious, including as justification for racism. We have to rethink how to talk about genetics. With a PhD in Genetics and a degree in evolutionary biology, Adam Rutherford is well known for his BBC Radio 4 flagship science programme ‘Inside Science’, as well as many documentaries, on the inheritance of intelligence, on MMR and autism, human evolution, astronomy and art, science and cinema, scientific fraud, and the evolution of sex. On television, his latest series was The Beauty of Anatomy on BBC4, on the role of the human dissection in art.

Adam also presented the award-winning Horizon: Playing God (BBC2, Jan 2012); The Gene Code (BBC4, Apr 2011); and the award-winning The Cell (BBC4, Sept 2009).

A movie geek, Adam was scientific advisor to Björk’s movie Biophilia Live and worked on World War Z, The Secret Service (2014) and Ex Machina (2015). His critically acclaimed first book, Creation – on the origin and future of life – was published in 2013, and was nominated for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. He is currently writing his second, and third. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx