I like Adam Rutherford’s style, he’s good at describing complicated scientific concepts well and that’s useful for this book which takes on the huge topic of eugenics. The book is in two halves, the first describing the history of eugenics and the different forms it has taken, and the second looking at the global impacts and where we are today, and where we might be going.

I can absolutely see how this book came about, Adam finally having enough abuse on Twitter to warrant a response longer than the however-many-characters is allowed. It does exactly what it says on the tin and whilst initially I wasn’t sure how a whole book could be sustained by the simple notion of ‘stop being an idiot’, actually, it does a really good deep dive into why we essentially don’t know anything about anything and therefore can’t be so cock-sure that one race is better than the other. Because they’re not. What is race anyway?