A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes

by Adam Rutherford

The Forer effect is a psychological phenomenon where people conclude that broadly true statements are accurate for themselves personally, when they are in fact generically true for many people.

Mark Twain wrote in 1869 that ‘travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.’

From 1907 when Indiana passed the first mandate, until 1963, forced sterilization was legally administered in thirty-one states, with California the most vigorous adopter. The most recent cases of forced sterilization in that famously liberal state occurred in 2010.

Native American women were forcibly sterilized in their thousands, and as late as the 1970s, black women with multiple children were being sterilized under the threat of withheld welfare, or in some cases without their knowledge.

There is no single gene that underpins the concept of race, just like there are so few genes for any one complex human characteristic,