Hello everyone, welcome to the Winescape Podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

In recent years, it's been a lot of discussion and controversy about the idea of scientific

racism, the use of scientific data or techniques to purportedly justify racist policies or

attitudes or thoughts about other kinds of human beings.

Now, as soon as I say the phrase, scientific racism and tell you what it is, hackles get

raised, right?

There's going to be some people listening who say, it's not racism, it's just science.

We're just doing science, we're classifying people, we're purely understanding the world.

Why are you trying to ruin it by calling it racism?

Other people are going to say, it's not scientific, right?

This is not, this is pseudo science.

This is just a perversion of science.

And on either side, people become very emotional, very, very quickly.

I mean, even if you're in the middle, you tend to sort of get very wary about this kind

of discourse just because other people are so passionate and let's be frank, it lowers

your cognitive abilities when your emotional valence goes way up like that.

So whatever feeling you have, when I start talking about this issue, I'm doing that intentionally.

Saver that feeling, get an idea of what that feeling is because our guest today, Paige

Harden, who's a psychologist at the University of Texas, wants us to move beyond that feeling.

She wants to be able to talk about issues like genes and DNA and how they influence whether

strongly or weekly life outcomes, your educational attainment, what kind of job you're going

...