And of those responding neurons, 51 fired in response to only a single person or thing. One neuron responded only to Halle Berry, for example. Amazingly, the Halle Berry neuron responded to any pictur...
Among children who grew up in affluent families, the heritability was about 60 percent. But twins from poorer families showed no greater correlation than other siblings. Their heritability was close t...
A virus does not reproduce by copying its own genes and dividing in two. Instead, it invades a host cell.
A child’s humors might be able to weaken that impression. Or a healthy parent’s seed could sometimes counter a diseased one. The defect still lurked in the child, who could then pass it down to its ow...
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.
They found that the fetal cells from their sons reached their brains, sprouted branches, and pumped out neurotransmitters. Their sons helped shape their thoughts.
The idea of a pure race is not even a legitimate abstraction, Dobzhansky wrote. It is a subterfuge to cloak one’s ignorance.
The extra clutter adds no important insight; instead, it offers more clutter in which erros can lurk.
The Galtons were a pious family of Quakers, but by the end of the 1700s, the wealth they made from war and slavery had largely turned the Society of Friends against them. In 1790, a faction of Quakers...
Psychiatrists devised intelligence tests for the courts. In one exam, they gave subjects a suitcase, books, bottles, and other objects. They had to pack the suitcase so that the lid could be easily cl...
Mercado urged instead that people with the same defect not marry, because their children would be at greatest risk of developing the same hereditary disease. All people should seek out a spouse as dif...
It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights,
Influenza. If you close your eyes and say the word aloud, it sounds lovely. It would make a good name for a pleasant, ancient Italian village.
In the 1400s, people began to use a new word to define a group of animals that shared the same blood: a race.
If a cat lost her tail and then gave birth to tailless cats, the scientific thing to do would be to track down the father and see if he had a tail or not. There was no need to invoke acquired characte...
Human rhinoviruses may help train our immune systems not to overreact to minor triggers, instead directing their assaults to real threats. Perhaps we should not think of colds as ancient enemies but a...