Adam Rutherford

It's NYC

It's not legals in most of the world to do embryo selection for traits. It is in the US.

yep, absolutely grotesque.

Perhaps they mean 'the heritability of intelligence is around 50%', which is roughly accurate, but measures the genetic component of the variance of the trait in a specific population.

Slightly less snappy as an advertising slogan.

The sentence 'IQ is 50% genetic' is meaningless.

Grim. Scientifically illiterate, and the techniques they are selling will be largely ineffective anyway.

See my book, Control: the Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics.

Apart from a nerdy film podcast I like, this was my most listened to podcast of the year. This is episode is emblematic of why.

Wolf Alice tonight was genuinely one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to. And I saw Radiohead’s week.

Wolf Alice tonight was genuinely one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to. And I saw Radiohead’s week.

Accurate

Me too! I’ve got a few in the new book: Archimedes never said eureka, Galileo never said eppur si muove, etc

And for the record, my books of the year were The Safekeep by Yael Van de Vouden, and the Ghosts of Iron Mountain by @philtinline.bsky.social. Both essential and brilliant.

Darwin quotes are mostly made up too. It’s quite fun just ploughing through the ‘yep, never said it’.

My relu dropout is fexcecetorn

Yes, medical fryambial and &runctitional features.

Well done all involved.

APRIL!

Alas died in the poorhouse in Hackney. Som of Benjamin Handy, owner of Handy’s travelling circus, married to Native American Mary Huntley, marked as ‘savage’ on their marriage certificate!

One of my ancestors was called Lycurgus Handy.

Notes from Beethoven’s genome Wesseldijk et al. compare the genomic information collected from Ludwig van Beethoven with population-based datasets used to quantify musical achievement.

If someone you know buys into claims about "genetic optimization" of embryos using polygenic scores of cognition, just send them our 2024 paper on Beethoven & musicality. We wrote it to help communicate limits of individual-level genetic predictions & complexity of links between DNA & behaviour. 🧪👇

Outstanding.

A delightful anatomy of one of the ever-expanding Polygenic Score fertility companies, this one engaging in some seriously snake oil-smelling marketing...

totalhealthoptimization.com/2025/11/21/c...

What other Starter Pack brings together @adamrutherford.bsky.social, @profaliceroberts.bsky.social, @iandunt.bsky.social, @jimalkhalili.bsky.social, @stephenfry.bsky.social and so many other lovely humanists in one place?

Best gig I’ve ever been to.

Radiohead have been the soundtrack to my life for the last 30 years. Each album, each track puts me in time and place.

Tonight will be my 8th time seeing them live.

This is true. Also: a clip from Crick ON Start the Week from 1994. The other guests were Salman Rushdie, Maya Angelou and Tom Stoppard, Melvyn the host.

Tomorrow!

Fun fact: Over the years, I have spoken to 6 male scientists who were funded or entertained in some capacity by Jeffrey Epstein. Every single one of them distanced themselves by declaring he was a ‘creep’.

He’s really rubbing it in now.