It isn't creativity that fades, but stamina: science is an endurance sport
Some may smile and may feel that this is but a new version of the old dream of the perfection of man. It is that, but it is something more. The old dreams of the cultural perfections of man were alway...
As the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane had described it in 1923, once the power to control genes had been harnessed, "no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe.
When power is discovered, man always turns to it," Bateson wrote darkly. "The science of heredity will soon provide power on stupendous scale; and in some country, at some time not, perhaps, far dista...
The rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity in the opening weeks of the 20th century sparked a scientific quest to understand the nature and content of genetic information that has propelled biology...
Muller was catapulted into the international fame by his discovery. The effect of radiation on the mutation rate in flies had two immediate implications. First, genes had to be made of matter. Radiati...
Gene, protein, function, and fate were strung in a chain: one chemical alteration in one base pair in DNA was sufficient to "encode" a radical change in human fate.
Phenotype, in short, drags genotypes behind it, like a cart pulling a horse. It is the perennial conundrum of natural selection that it seeks one thing (fitness) and accidentally finds another (genes...
This was the missing link in Darwin's Logic: reproductive incompatibility, ultimately derived from genetic incompatibility, drove the origin of novel species.