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Givewell.org. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and my guest today is

Catherine Page Hardin. She goes by Paige, and she's a professor of psychology and behavioral

genetics at the University of Texas, Austin, and she's the author of the recently published book,

The Genetic Lottery, Why DNA Matters for Social Equality,

which I found really interesting and well argued, especially given that it's about a pretty

controversial subject, the effect of our genes on important life outcomes, like educational

success. So in the first part of the episode, we talk about why that's

such a controversial thing to study and to write about, literally to give you a sense of what a

live wire topic this is. Paige has gotten emails from other professors telling her that she's,

quote, no better than a Holocaust denier for doing this research.

So we talk about that reaction and where it comes from, and then we get into the science of,

okay, how much of educational success is explained by genes?

And what does it actually mean to say that educational success is explained by genes? And why do we need to

...