Control Quotes

“Intelligence: Born Smart, Born Equal, Born Different,”
― Adam Rutherford, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics

“Repository for Germinal Choice in Escondido, California,”
― Adam Rutherford, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics

“The press loves a heretic, especially one who can set fire to things and then walk away to look for the next pile of kindling. It is more problematic when the arsonist is in the heart of government, but is ill informed and, worse, spellbound by a science that is barely understood by experts, let alone tourists.”
― Adam Rutherford, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics

“However, if your understanding of a science extends only to the point where your political preconceptions are supported, then you are an ideologue, not a scientist.”
― Adam Rutherford, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics

“today the commercial ancestry market is worth billions and relies on a weak supposition that the composition of your DNA will reveal the identities of your forebears in time and space. At best it’s a fudge, a spell to bewitch your romantic and sentimental urges—to belong to a tribe of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons or other noble warriors. But really it’s just gassy bullshit. What modern genetics has shown unequivocally is that while there are differences among people around the world, which manifest broadly as”
― Adam Rutherford, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics

“played”
― Adam Rutherford, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics

“We often deploy the clumsy ideas of nature and nurture to describe what is innate in us, and what is extrinsic. What this really means is: genetics (that is, what is encoded in DNA), and everything else in the universe. Your genome is a script, etched into the kernel at the center of your cells, but the film of your life is played out in the countless forces that determine how that script is performed. Nature was never versus nurture; it is and always was via.”
― Adam Rutherford, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics