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...
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...
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 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 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...
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.
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...
Burbank might produce thousands of hybrid offspring from which he might pick just a few to propagate into a new generation.
A virus does not reproduce by copying its own genes and dividing in two. Instead, it invades a host cell.
When news of the results got out, it caused many Americans to look at their country with a new sense of self-loathing. We have a working majority of voters who have children’s minds, a prominent newsp...
We use words like sister and aunt as if they describe rigid laws of biology. But despite our genetic essentialism, these laws are really only rules of thumb. Under the right conditions, they can be re...
Today's Europeans are fairly uniform, genetically speaking. But that uniformity came out of a biological blender.
To eliminate feeblemindedness, Goddard rejected the calls of people like McKim to kill the feebleminded. But he did want to make sure they didn’t get to have children. And by they, Goddard mostly mean...
They have come up with a bold idea: Our minds, too, are shaped by conflict between our parents’ genes.
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.