You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Those who confidently assert truths in science are often buoyed by ignorance rather than

knowledge.

Adam Rutherford is a geneticist, an author of the new book Control, the dark history and

troubling present of eugenics.

The book traces the origins of the field of genetics.

This is the study of genes and DNA, but really what it is, is it's the study of sex and

families and inheritance and just the way that information and biology is conveyed from

generations generation.

And this idea of inheritance that people can pass parts of themselves onto their kids,

it's something humans have long observed.

The earliest specific examples of what I consider to be genetic counseling or genetic

information about how like units of inheritance are passing generations generation comes from

the Talmud.

Right?

So third century BC there's an instruction which says that if three of your brothers

have died at birth from bleeding to death following circumcision then the fourth brother

is allowed not to be circumcised.

And what we now think that is, is a description of the inheritance pattern of hemophilia.

The idea of biological inheritance comes to the forefront in the late 1800s with Darwin's

on the origin of species published in 1859.

It's out of this scientific advancement that the idea of eugenics is created and starts

...