In the years after he was forced out of Vineland, Goddard drifted away from the eugenics movement. Rather than figuring out how to keep the feebleminded from having children, Goddard spent his time tr...
Humanity, in other words, was not some genetically uniform stock that could be purged of a few defectives. Penrose saw our species as rich with genetic diversity, and forever falling short of genetic...
When Europeans colonized Africa, they helped trigger giant epidemics by forcing people to stay and work in tsetse-infested places. In 1906, Winston Churchill, who was the colonial undersecretary at th...
I never knew any man who had once tasted the sweetness of experimental knowledge, that ever afterward fasted after ye Vapour garlick and onions of phantasmatical seeming philosophy. [William Petty]
I am a single, useless snail-loathing datum.
History of heredity
To my surprise, I discovered that anesthesiologists are a bit in the dark themselves. How anesthesia works has been a mystery since the discovery of anesthesia itself, writes Michael Alkire, an anesth...
They made a compelling case that height could serve as an economic barometer, recording the well-being of societies.
There is thus more Neanderthal DNA on Earth today than when Neanderthals existed.
The story of the Kallikaks, Goddard concluded, was a powerful argument for rounding up the feebleminded and putting them in colonies, at least until a better solution could be found.
The seventy-six-year-old Burbank told them that he was no atheist. He subscribed to what he hoped would someday become a religion of humanity, worshiping a God as revealed to us gradually, step by ste...
The Danish plant physiologist Wilhelm Johannsen gave Mendel’s factors a new name: genes. As to the nature of the ‘genes,’ Johannsen warned, it is as yet of no value to propose any hypothesis.
Many American women go without prenatal care during pregnancy, while expectant mothers in the Netherlands get free house calls from nurses.
In the early 1900s, a Florida farmer found a notable bud sport while inspecting his grove of Walters grapefruit trees. Tree after tree bore white fruit, except one. On that tree, the farmer spotted a...
In 1950, a thirty-year-old scientist named Rosalind Franklin arrived at King’s College London to study the shape of DNA. She and a graduate student named Raymond Gosling created crystals of DNA, which...
In 1939, Hitler expanded his campaign against the feebleminded, launching a program to kill children judged to be idiots, along with those suffering deformities. Their parents were told that they had...
He imagined this program as a joyous ritual, bringing gifted young people together to have better and better children.
Careful imitation could also explain why hand axes managed to stay so similar to each other for over a million years. If Homo erectus simply looked over old hand axes to guess how to make them, they w...
By one estimate, genealogy has now become the second-most-popular search topic on the Internet. It is outranked only by porn.
Burbank might produce thousands of hybrid offspring from which he might pick just a few to propagate into a new generation.