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...
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...
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.
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.
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...
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,...
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.
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...
Chromosomes were chemical mixtures, including proteins as well as a mysterious molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA for short.
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...