To reach that conclusion, testing advocates had to ignore all sorts of experiences that could influence the scores—especially those in early childhood, when the brain is still developing.
To Galton, eugenics was full of happy visions of arranged marriages that would lead to ever-better generations of humans.
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 strange stripes on apples—known as twin spotting—might occur because a cell had two copies of a gene for color. One copy might be a light variant, the other dark. When the cell divided, it acciden...
The idea of a pure race is not even a legitimate abstraction, Dobzhansky wrote. It is a subterfuge to cloak one’s ignorance.
Poverty may be powerful enough to swamp the influence of variants in our DNA.
Montaigne was a French courtier who retired from political life in 1571 to sit in a castle tower and reflect on vanity and happiness, on liars and friendship. While he found comfort in this solitude,...
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,
Intelligence is far from blood types. While test scores are unquestionably heritable, their heritability is not 100 percent. It sits instead somewhere near the middle of the range of possibilities. Wh...
In fact, there's no single species of bacteria that we humans all share. We house personalized zoos.
In fact, Galton believed England’s future well-being depended on a national breeding program to produce more talented humans.
If I could compare cells from my left and right hands, they would not be genetically identical, but they would be vastly more similar to each other than to any cell from my brother, Ben.
Chromosomes were chemical mixtures, including proteins as well as a mysterious molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA for short.
By one estimate, genealogy has now become the second-most-popular search topic on the Internet. It is outranked only by porn.
Between 1890 and 1910, more than twelve million immigrants traveled from Europe to Ellis Island. Doctors inspected thousands of people arriving there each day to make sure they were in good physical h...
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, C, G, T for short. A cell carries out a series of chemical reactions to translate a gene’s sequence of bases into a protein. A cell first makes a copy of the gene, creating a single-stranded series...
When we see faces, we don’t just recognize them; we also make the same face, if only for a moment.
When he bred them, he would discover variations among their offspring.