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.
It was final sour proof of something Harvey had suspected for years: Man, he declared, is but a great mischievous baboon.
In the picture, Burbank has a grandfatherly smile, a shock of gray hair, a starched collar, and a black tie. The image belonged to an earlier chapter in the history of heredity, when breeders could us...
In the eighteenth century, the average European man stood just five foot five.
In 1814 the breeders founded an organization, the title of which was—deep breath—The Association of Friends, Experts and Supporters of Sheep Breeding for the achievement of a more rapid and more thoro...
If you stop and think through what it means to grow, the process is astonishing. Each part of the body has to change its shape and size to match every other part. There’s no central blueprint for the...
He might breed them for years before reaching the proper form. After a few years of breeding a type of lily, Burbank found a single specimen that met his standards. A rabbit ate it.
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.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, eugenics had begun taking root in the United States, and there it flowered into darker blooms. American eugenicists wanted to prevent people with bad traits from...
Based on estimates of the somatic mutation rate, some researchers have estimated that there might be over ten quadrillion new mutations scattered in each of us.
At long last, we may be returning to the original two-sided sense of the word virus, which originally signified either a life-giving substance or a deadly venom. Viruses are indeed exquisitely deadly,...
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...
White was convinced that the moron majority, as he dubbed it, must be a recent development.
When Morgan looked at the pedigrees of families like the Kallikaks, he did not see undeniable proof of the heredity of feeblemindedness. He saw instead many generations of poor people suffering enduri...
When Adolf Hitler was imprisoned in 1924, he learned of the Kallikaks in a book he read about heredity. Soon after, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, in which he mimicked the language of American eugenicists,...
Two hallmarks of Homo Sapiens are decoration and self-identification.
Today, Latvian women have become the tallest women in the world, jumping from about five foot one to five foot seven. Dutch men rose from five foot seven in 1860 to just over six feet tall, making the...
The whole problem of heredity has undergone a complete revolution, Bateson declared. Mendel’s discoveries could at last mature into a true science. Bateson christened it genetics.
The program, known as T4, would ultimately claim 200,000 lives. It operated on a scale so far beyond what the Nazis had attempted before that they had to invent new technology for the slaughter—includ...