Can you even argue with racists and other bigots?

For all its intentions, Adam Rutherford’s new book, How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality, may not pass muster.

This is not to suggest that it’s a waste of time; on the contrary, Rutherford offers much to consider in a timely work. It’s just that, well, history, science, race and reality count for little when arguing with bigots and other irrational people.

Or as Jonathan Swift put it back in the early 1700s: “Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.”

Rutherford makes the point that science, or rather pseudoscience, is increasingly being used to bolster racist ideologies and is frequently factored in to public discourse on politics, migration, education, sport and intelligence.

Racial stereotypes and myths are not only expressed by overt racists, but also“by by cultural the well-intentioned whose views have been fashioned baggage” and other life experiences and are not supported by the study of human genetics, Rutherford’s particular area of expertise. (He does know his stuff. He presents the BBC Radio 4 programme Inside Science and his first book, Creation: The Origin of Life/The Future of Life, was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Prize.)

The takeouts from the book are fascinating, such as that, logically, there is a genetic “isopoint” when the entire population of the planet were the ancestors of everyone alive today “For — humans, and that”moment Rutherford was a mere 3,400 years ago. writes, “there are no purebloods, only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes.”

In other words, as critic Manjit Kumar noted in his Guardian review of How to Argue With a Racist, every white supremacist on Earth has ancestors who are, among others, African, Indian, Chinese, Native American, Middle Eastern and indigenous Australian. And every Nazi had Jewish blood.