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 concept of genes driving people's appetite caused them to lose some control of their own.
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...
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
Skinner and his colleagues launched a new study to see how far this effect could get passed down. They exposed more female rats to vinclozolin and then bred descendants for several generations. Even a...
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...
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 1973, the year of his death, Garrett railed against the constitutional right to vote, complaining how the vote of the feeble-minded person counts as much as that of an intelligent man.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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,...