The Burbank Seedling, as Gregory generously named it, quickly became one of the best-known crops in the United States. A descendant of that variety, the Russet Burbank, carpets much of the state of Id...
History of heredity
Defective genes.
A virus does not reproduce by copying its own genes and dividing in two. Instead, it invades a host cell.
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...
When Dias gave the trained mice a whiff of acetophenone, they tended to freeze in their tracks. Dias also found that a whiff of acetophenone made the mice more prone to startle at a loud noise. In oth...
It is we who are the parasites, and Earth the host
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...
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...
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...
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 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 extra clutter adds no important insight; instead, it offers more clutter in which erros can lurk.
Many American women go without prenatal care during pregnancy, while expectant mothers in the Netherlands get free house calls from nurses.
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]
He imagined this program as a joyous ritual, bringing gifted young people together to have better and better children.
Burbank might produce thousands of hybrid offspring from which he might pick just a few to propagate into a new generation.
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...
Today's Europeans are fairly uniform, genetically speaking. But that uniformity came out of a biological blender.