Punctuated equilibrium

Here we go. I have finally joined Substack. Science, history, politics, and possibly some pop culture.

I’ve been meaning to do this for what seems like geological eons, and never quite finding the space for it, but I posted something on Instagram the other day, and since then, this until-now non-existent Substack suddenly got a tsunami of new subscribers. Perhaps a trickle would be more accurate. Hello you! (see postscript).

I am a scientist – a geneticist who specialises in evolutionary biology, and particularly its history. I’m a lecturer at UCL, where I teach Genetics and Society, science communication, and research population genetics. I’ve written a few books about genetics, evolution, and what DNA can tell us about history. Which means I’m also a de facto historian of science, and specifically the history of scientific racism and eugenics. I sit here typing these words in my office on Gower St in London, my window above the Blue Plaque which marks Charles Darwin’s residency in buildings now long gone, the place where his beloved daughter Annie was born. These offices were also the home of the birth of eugenics, its midwife Darwin’s (half-)cousin Francis Galton, and neonatal care deployed by Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fisher – brilliant men who were the founders of the modern science of evolution. We love to revel in that delicious Newtonian maxim that we stand on the shoulders of giants. But we’re not so hot on recognising that some of those giants might have been bastards. In my field, our intellectual forebears also held views that were not atypical for their time – scientific racism, sexism, and other -isms – but are pretty grotesque to us today.

Or at least that is what we might’ve thought.

I write (and broadcast) about the legacy of those views in society today. This is a time where eugenics is making something of an alarming comeback, and anti-science policy is in the heart of global politics. There really is no point in fannying about with milquetoast words that news journalists seem to be bound by: Donald Trump appears not to have any definable ideology, but both he and Elon Musk are aligned and associated with eugenics, fascism and scientific racism in ways which are neither original nor sophisticated. Jordan Peterson – a man unburdened by a high-school understanding of evolutionary theory – has the ear of the most powerful, and his dearth of scientific knowledge does not seem to preclude constant pronouncements about science. Robert Kennedy Jnr is a bog-standard antivaccine conspiracy dolt, but somehow now holds the most important role in American medicine. Friends and colleagues in the USA are expecting their tax-funded grants to be axed without warning (if it hasn’t happened already) as the demented, scattergun, probably illegal edicts tumble out of the deranged chaos of the Whitehouse.

The return of scientific racism has occurred online, on Twitter/X, and here on Substack too. Voices that would’ve historically been confined to boring men in regional pubs are now mainstream and championed by the richest and most powerful people in the West. We’ve recently seen the exposure by Hope Not Hate and the Guardian of networks of writers and activists who have successfully colonised these online spaces with the specific intent of normalising and promoting their views, which they typically characterise as ‘heterodox’, or ‘race realist’, or even heretical – they pose as truth seekers in a world bewitched by political correctness. In fact, they would be more accurately described as wrong, scientifically spurious, and/or actually racist.

I used to write them off as fringe science race wienies – nary a geneticist or credible scientist among them, yet somehow genetics and scientific racism are the enduring passions of their lives. But the Hope Not Hate investigation (in which I had a minor advisory role) showed that they got organised, and funded, and their long-outmoded views have found favour with the techbro billionaires of Silicon Valley with all their unearned power, and the populist politicians whose voices now are now deafening.

My work almost always sits in the space between primary scientific research and the rest of the world. I’m interested in how new research gets co-opted into ideologies. That defines the history of my field – biology itself born in service of European expansion and colonialism, genetics born out of the White supremacy ideology of eugenics. And I’m interested in public understanding of genetics, and science education.

So what you’ll get here is a mixture of science, its role in society, in politics, in culture. I’ll be analysing new papers, and expanding on my own published work, and sincerely invite debate, discussion and good faith criticism.

Example: last week, there was yet another round of the stenographic regurgitation of the fiction that mammoths will soon be resurrected using new genetics techniques. I found this unusually vexatious – and wrote it up for the Guardian, with some of the same ideas I expressed on an episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage last year - science miscommunication, lazy client journalism and scientific hubris. It really grinds my gears that in a time when science is literally under threat from ideologues, a swivelled-eye press goes bonkers for this utter bollocks. On Bluesky (and before I bailed on the Sunnydale hellmouth that is Twitter/X) I’d frequently get a reply that sarcastically said ‘tell us what you really think, Adam’. Well here, for what it’s worth, I’m going to tell you what I really think.

What is it worth? I’m going to try to post once a week, and leave it all free for now, but will start a paid subscription model later, tbd.

It won’t always be that grumpy or snarky. I’m also a broadcaster - I present a lot of programmes on BBC Radio 4 - notably the weekly culture programme Start the Week, but also various series about things I am interested in – such as The Human Subject, which I present with my brilliant friend and colleague Dr. Julia Shaw. So I’m going to use this space to develop ideas contained within those programmes, to talk about books, and films and plays that I’ve discussed or reviewed. I’ve done a lot of work as a science advisor on films, some modern masterpieces (Ex Machina, Annihilation – that skull in my avatar pic is a prop of Ava’s skull given to me after Ex Machina was finished), others… ummm.

Finally, I’m working on my 8th book right now, this one my magnum opus: a new history of the universe and of science, following on from one of my favourite popular science books, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I love that book; it’s not scholarly, and Bill is not a scientist, but by Odin’s ravens, he knows how to tell a story.

In it, I will be writing new stories about the history of science that move us away from the Great Man Theory fables that the history of science is unerringly ensorcelled by, despite the fact that many of them are untrue, or distort the real process of science: beautiful, collaborative, messy, political, complex, ugly, revolutionary, warts and all. Instead, I want to find new voices, new stories, and I hope, a better, richer, more honest version of this thing that I have dedicated my life to studying and celebrating.

So, to paraphrase Mark Watney, we’re going to science the fuck out of this website. Sign up, strap in, subscribe and get involved.

PS: Punctuated equilibrium is a model in evolutionary theory, long periods of not much going on, interspersed with moments of great impactful drama.

PPS: When I presented Inside Science, BBC Radio 4’s weekly science programme, I would always start the podcast version with this greeting, which prompted my favourite ever piece of correspondence:

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