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.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
Single base may change from A to C. A stretch of a hundred bases may be accidentally copied out twice. A thousand bases may be cut out altogether. These are the mutations that scientists like Hugo de...
History of heredity
Defective genes.
[Writing to Lucretius, on Epicurus' belief that the soul was no different from the rest of the cosmos; made of atoms] Death is therefore nothing to us, and does not concern us at all, since it appears...
When Nature Neuroscience published Dias’s study on memories of smells, they put a picture of Lamarck on the cover, complete with a thatch of gray hair and a high cravat. New
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...
We humans have 23 pairs, but pea plants have only 7. Yeast have 16. Some butterflies have 134.