REVIEW – Devizes Arts Festival – Adam Rutherford @ Corn Exchange  5th June 2024

Andy Fawthrop

It’s All In The Genes

Today Devizes Arts Festival presentation took on a more serious and talkative tone with another marquee signing taking to the stage.  And it was another good audience with plenty of trade at the bar and at the merch desk.

Adam Rutherford is a geneticist, author and broadcaster who frequently appears on science programmes on both radio and TV. He presents Radio 4’s flagship programme Start the Week and was the host of Inside Science for eight years. His popular series The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry has been on air for a decade. He’s written extensively on race, genetics, evolution and trust in science. As an honorary senior research associate at University College London, he teaches courses on genetics and communication.  A self-confessed “science nerd” he’s a Professor of Evolutionary Genetics.

It’s a long time since I last attended a formal lecture, with a full Powerpoint deck to get through, but that’s what we got.  Taking station behind a pulpit-like lectern, Adam quickly went into professor mode and quickly taught us all a LOT about genetics, DNA, descent and the various trees of life.  It sounds slightly dry and boring, but it was very far from that, as he casually dropped in one amazing fact after another, along with amusing anecdotes, and debunked many myths about the whole business of human evolution and descent.

We were fed some lovely gobbets along the way, such as: it’s believed that 97% of all species that have ever existed on Earth are now extinct, that 2% of the DNA of all modern humans is Neanderthal and that Danny Dyer is not alone in being able to claim direct descent from Edward III, since the mathematical probability of anyone/ everyone being descended from that same monarch is 100%.

We learned that there’s a lot that we don’t know.  Ignorance begets (misplaced) confidence, and confidence begets a lot of (incorrect) speculation and theorising. “Popular science” has a lot to answer for, including the use of inappropriate comparisons, metaphors and illustrations.  There’s no such thing as genetic “progress” (in the sense of improvement), only continuing change.  Using a series of “trees” (tree of life, tree of human life, the family tree of Charles II of Spain, the tree of Charlemagne and the Who Do You Think You Are? tree), Adam progressively illustrated how many of our ideas and assumptions are often some way from the truth or scientific evidence.

There was plenty of amusement too.  The more complex theories and illustrations were summarised as “clusterfucks”.  The act of sexual congress became “a gene flow event”.  And multi-generational in-breeding was “sub-optimal”. 

The takeaways from all this were that this whole genetics and human descent issue is a lot more complex than we think it is, that racism and eugenics are concepts that defy any logic or evidence you apply to them, and that mathematics can teach us a lot about what’s really happening. We learned about the “isopoint”, where the entire population at a certain point/ date is the ancestor of the entire population of today.

It was half time and, boy, did everybody need a drink to think about all that lot.  It must have been inspiring, as the book-signing desk was overwhelmed with willing customers, and the second half (which consisted of a prolonged Q&A session) was fully engaged by fascinated punters.

Adam fielded a range of questions, despite some mic problems, including those on DNA Testing kits (largely a waste of time and money, and a rip-off monetisation of the world’s most valuable datafile), Artificial Intelligence (useful for data mining), and our African origins (we’re all African and 100% similar at the DNA level).

Like I said earlier, it sounds dry.  But it really wasn’t.  Despite the serious subject matter, it was informative and absolutely fascinating.  Adam is no comedian, but he does have a light touch, and just like on the radio, he was able to bring science very much to life, to engage his audience, and to leave everyone a little richer in understanding.  His passionate dismissal of racism and eugenics owes little to morality or emotion (although I was sure that was there too), but to simple cold-hearted scientific data, evidence and analysis.  That gets my vote every single time.

His new series will be on BBC Radio 4 Bad Blood: The Story of Eugenics and his new book, out now Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics. More information on Adam is available at www.adamrutherford.com/

Another great night at the Arts Festival, and thanks (once again) to DAF for having the vision to bring these types of entertainment to our little town. 

The Devizes Arts Festival continues until Sunday 16^th June at various venues around the town.  Tickets can be booked at Devizes Books or online at www.devizesartsfestival.org.uk

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