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.
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.
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.
When we see faces, we don’t just recognize them; we also make the same face, if only for a moment.
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.
The concept of genes driving people's appetite caused them to lose some control of their own.
Something must happen to ‘stir up their heredities,’ as I am fond of saying—to excite in them the variability that normally lies dormant, Burbank later explained
It was final sour proof of something Harvey had suspected for years: Man, he declared, is but a great mischievous baboon.
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...
Gravettian men stood on average six feet tall. When agriculture arrived in Europe some eight thousand years ago, people experienced a tremendous drop in stature. Men lost eight inches of height. The d...
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...
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.
What is striking about them is that the father-leaning disorders tend to produce autistic symptoms. The mother-leaning disorders tend to produce schizophrenic ones.
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.