Poverty may be powerful enough to swamp the influence of variants in our DNA.
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,
In the eighteenth century, the average European man stood just five foot five.
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...
Guns and slavery grew even more intertwined in the Galton family fortune. By the 1750s, the Galtons were delivering more than twenty-five thousand guns a year to European traders, who sold the weapons...
Goddard conjured up a specter of attractive, feebleminded women wantonly seducing decent men. He warned that the country’s reformatories were full of feebleminded girls who do not conform to the conve...
Galton recognized that in order to win people to his cause, he would need, as he put it, a brief word to express the science of improving stock. In 1883, he came up with an enduring term: eugenics.
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...
[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
We humans have 23 pairs, but pea plants have only 7. Yeast have 16. Some butterflies have 134.
Two hallmarks of Homo Sapiens are decoration and self-identification.
To Galton, eugenics was full of happy visions of arranged marriages that would lead to ever-better generations of humans.
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 ability to read DNA allowed scientists to measure this genetic similarity in real people. In 2006, Peter Visscher, a geneticist at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Australia, and hi...
Since hominin skin doesn’t fossilize, we can’t say for sure what skin color our ancestors had four million years ago. But if our closest living primate relatives—gorillas and chimpanzees—are any guide...
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,...