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5cc1e9f
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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.
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Carl Zimmer |
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359bce5
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Mercado urged instead that people with the same defect not marry, because their children would be at greatest risk of developing the same hereditary disease. All people should seek out a spouse as different from themselves in as many individual characteristics as possible.
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Carl Zimmer |
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e4bc122
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If a cat lost her tail and then gave birth to tailless cats, the scientific thing to do would be to track down the father and see if he had a tail or not. There was no need to invoke acquired characters to explain why musk ox have thick fur. Natural selection favored individuals that, for whatever reason, had warmer coats that made them less likely to freeze to death.
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Carl Zimmer |
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d2b8f73
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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, they likely had light skin.
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Carl Zimmer |
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ff21243
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To eliminate feeblemindedness, Goddard rejected the calls of people like McKim to kill the feebleminded. But he did want to make sure they didn't get to have children. And by "they," Goddard mostly meant women."
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Carl Zimmer |
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503252b
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The story of the Kallikaks, Goddard concluded, was a powerful argument for rounding up the feebleminded and putting them in colonies, at least until a better solution could be found.
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Carl Zimmer |
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32e10b6
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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 construction of an adult human. Each cell has to decide for itself, using nothing more than chemical signals and its own network of genes, RNA molecules, and proteins.
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Carl Zimmer |
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c6df8af
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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 health. In 1907, Congress passed a law to also exclude "imbeciles, feeble-minded and persons with physical or mental defects which might affect their ability to earn a living." The new law meant that the doctors on Ellis Island had to inspect th..
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Carl Zimmer |
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01be10d
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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."
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Carl Zimmer |
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c2c5e20
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By one estimate, genealogy has now become the second-most-popular search topic on the Internet. It is outranked only by porn.
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Carl Zimmer |
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fafe154
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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 that the substance of the soul is perishable. When the separation of body and soul, whose union is the essence of our being, is consummated, it is clear that absolutely nothing will be able to reach us and awaken our sensibility, not even if e..
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Carl Zimmer |
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bcd746b
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Goddard's staff kept careful records of the tests, which he analyzed back in Vineland. The results stunned him: A huge proportion of the immigrants tested as feebleminded. Goddard broke down the results by ethnic group: 79 percent of Italians were feebleminded, 83 percent of Jews, 87 percent of Russians.
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Carl Zimmer |
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0479fd7
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It was final sour proof of something Harvey had suspected for years: "Man, "he declared, "is but a great mischievous baboon."
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Carl Zimmer |
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654ddad
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I never knew any man who had once tasted the sweetness of experimental knowledge, that ever afterward fasted after ye Vapour garlick and onions of phantasmatical seeming philosophy." [William Petty]"
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Carl Zimmer |
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97a8f94
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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 use their intuitions to produce new fruits and flowers, becoming masters of forces they didn't understand. By the 1940s, when the beer ad appeared, heredity meant something very different. It was now a precise molecular science in the hands of so..
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Carl Zimmer |
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2c48e7e
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The seventy-six-year-old Burbank told them that he was no atheist. He subscribed to what he hoped would someday become a religion of humanity, worshiping a God "as revealed to us gradually, step by step, by the demonstrable truths of our savior, science," he said to his audience. Burbank didn't see the point of wasting time pondering hypothetical eternities in heaven or hell. Heredity--the continuity of life through the generations--was vas..
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Carl Zimmer |
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a0bfce6
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Many American women go without prenatal care during pregnancy, while expectant mothers in the Netherlands get free house calls from nurses.
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Carl Zimmer |
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21ae450
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It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights," Pearl wrote. "Though the mind has gone away, though he cannot speak or communicate with anyone, the human stuff is there, and he belongs to the human family."
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Carl Zimmer |
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31da261
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The Danish plant physiologist Wilhelm Johannsen gave Mendel's factors a new name: genes. "As to the nature of the 'genes,'" Johannsen warned, "it is as yet of no value to propose any hypothesis."
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Carl Zimmer |
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577b1c5
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To Galton, eugenics was full of happy visions of arranged marriages that would lead to ever-better generations of humans.
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Carl Zimmer |
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da14fb1
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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 to African states engaged in increasingly bloody battles. The warring states captured prisoners in the fights, and then sold them to European slave traders. Before long, they demanded to be paid for the slaves with more guns instead of gold.
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Carl Zimmer |
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819878d
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American eugenicists wanted to prevent people with bad traits from having children. Some argued for institutionalizing the feebleminded to stop them from having sex. Some called for sterilization. In 1900, an American physician named W. D. McKim went so far as to call for "a gentle painless death." He envisioned the construction of gas chambers to kill "the very weak and the very vicious." It would be pointless to try to improve these peopl..
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Carl Zimmer |
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c7a3709
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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 conventions of society," who were "boy crazy" or, worst of all, "preferred the company of colored men to white."
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Carl Zimmer |
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b5fba66
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In 1950, a thirty-year-old scientist named Rosalind Franklin arrived at King's College London to study the shape of DNA. She and a graduate student named Raymond Gosling created crystals of DNA, which they bombarded with X-rays. The beams bounced off the crystals and struck photographic film, creating telltale lines, spots, and curves. Other scientists had tried to take pictures of DNA, but no one had created pictures as good as Franklin ha..
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Carl Zimmer |
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8fd1c98
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According to Goddard's standards, 47 percent of the white soldiers and 89 percent of the blacks should be categorized as morons. The average white soldier, the psychologists found, had a mental age of thirteen years, just barely above the cutoff for feeblemindedness. The majority of Americans, in other words, was feebleminded or close to it.
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Carl Zimmer |
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7768ad4
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Psychiatrists devised intelligence tests for the courts. In one exam, they gave subjects a suitcase, books, bottles, and other objects. They had to pack the suitcase so that the lid could be easily closed. Their lives might depend on that suitcase.
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Carl Zimmer |
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70a3874
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In 1939, Hitler expanded his campaign against the feebleminded, launching a program to kill children judged to be idiots, along with those suffering deformities. Their parents were told that they had died during surgery or due to an accidental overdose of sedatives.
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Carl Zimmer |
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ba594ce
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The "Burbank Seedling," as Gregory generously named it, quickly became one of the best-known crops in the United States. A descendant of that variety, the Russet Burbank, carpets much of the state of Idaho. They are the only potatoes that McDonald's, the biggest purchaser of potatoes in the United States, will accept for its french fries."
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Carl Zimmer |
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6dc0476
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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--including gas chambers. McKim's eugenic dream had become real.
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Carl Zimmer |
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bd95789
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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.
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Carl Zimmer |
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265ffcc
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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 enduring hardships. "It is obvious that these groups of individuals have lived under demoralizing social conditions that might swamp a family of average persons," Morgan wrote."
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Carl Zimmer |
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0b9d0ca
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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 having children. Some argued for institutionalizing the feebleminded to stop them from having sex. Some called for sterilization. In 1900, an American physician named W. D. McKim went so far as to call for "a gentle painless death." He envision..
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Carl Zimmer |
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30b7bc7
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In the years after he was forced out of Vineland, Goddard drifted away from the eugenics movement. Rather than figuring out how to keep the feebleminded from having children, Goddard spent his time trying to find ways to help children, no matter their condition. "As for myself," Goddard once said, "I think I have gone over to the enemy."
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Carl Zimmer |
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3c6d7df
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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."
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Carl Zimmer |
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4071d65
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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."
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Carl Zimmer |
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e9d4076
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When news of the results got out, it caused many Americans to look at their country with a new sense of self-loathing. "We have a working majority of voters who have children's minds," a prominent newspaper editor named William Allen White declared." --
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Carl Zimmer |
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573b532
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White was convinced that the "moron majority," as he dubbed it, must be a recent development."
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Carl Zimmer |
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ee60576
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defective genes.
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Carl Zimmer |
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fa5f785
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Based on their research, the Sanger scientists estimated that an embryo gains two or three new mutations every time its cells double.
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Carl Zimmer |
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e1d43bf
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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 his colleagues studied 4,401 pairs of siblings, examining several hundred genetic markers in each volunteer. The siblings often had a series of identical genetic markers along a chromosome--segments they inherited from one of their parents.
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Carl Zimmer |
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27d75d5
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The Galtons were a pious family of Quakers, but by the end of the 1700s, the wealth they made from war and slavery had largely turned the Society of Friends against them. In 1790, a faction of Quakers tried to bar the Galtons from their monthly meetings. Delegations of wealthy Quakers tried to persuade the Galtons to get into a different line of work. Samuel the elder agreed to stop taking profits from the family's gun business. But Samuel ..
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Carl Zimmer |
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d7ac49d
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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 other trials, Dias would pump an alcohol-like scent called propanol into the chamber instead, without giving the mice a shock. They didn't learn to fear that odor. Ten days after the training ended, researchers from Emory's animal resources depart..
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Carl Zimmer |
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823449a
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It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights,
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Carl Zimmer |
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4261633
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In the 1400s, people began to use a new word to define a group of animals that shared the same blood: a race.
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Carl Zimmer |