Quotes from Carl Zimmer

Goddard seemed comfortable with the notion that 40 percent of immigrants were morons. "It is admitted on all sides that we are getting now the poorest of each race

Each gene is a stretch of DNA, made up of thousands of bases.

All too often, doctors end up giving antibiotics to their patients with colds. This is a fundamentally pointless treatment, because antibiotics work only on bacteria and are useless against viruses.

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 of bases called ribonucleic acid, or RNA. That RNA molecule is taken up by a molecular factory called a ribosome, which reads the sequence of RNA and builds a corresponding protein.

We have a working majority of voters who have children's minds

single base may change from A to C. A stretch of a hundred bases may be accidentally copied out twice. A thousand bases may be cut out altogether. These are the mutations that scientists like Hugo de Vries and Thomas Hunt Morgan spent years trying to figure out. Mutations can produce new versions of genes—alleles, as they came to be known.

In fact, there's no single species of bacteria that we humans all share. We house personalized zoos.

Lewontin gathered measurements of seventeen different proteins in a wide range of human populations, from the Chippewa to the Zulu, from the Dutch to the people of Easter Island. When he sorted people according to their race, he found that the genetic differences between races accounted for only 6.3 percent of the total genetic diversity in humans. The genetic diversity within populations, such as the Zulu or the Dutch, contained a staggering 85.4 percent.

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.

influenza viruses manage to wreak their harm with very little genetic information—just thirteen genes.

Like cold-causing rhinoviruses, influenza viruses manage to wreak their harm with very little genetic information—just thirteen genes.

Ian Lipkin and his colleagues at Columbia University trapped 133 rats in New York City and discovered 18 new species of viruses that are closely related to human pathogens.

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, declaring that sterilization of defective people "is the most humane act of mankind.

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.

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.

For comparison, tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt.

Infants prefer to look at dots that move in biological patterns rather than random ones. They will look longer at geometrical shapes that seem to be self-propelled than ones that seem to move passively. Children also have a bias toward life in the way they learn: they can learn about animals faster than inanimate objects, and they hold on to the memories of what they learn longer. Our knowledge of life, in other words, arises long before we can tell ourselves what we know.

There is thus more Neanderthal DNA on Earth today than when Neanderthals existed.

In a study of fifty patients with SARS, they discovered a virus growing in two of them. The virus belonged to a group called coronaviruses, which includes species that can cause colds and the stomach flu. Peiris and his colleagues sequenced the genetic material in the new virus and then searched for matching genes in the other patients. They found a match in forty-five of them.

They made a compelling case that height could serve as an economic barometer, recording the well-being of societies.

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 drop was likely the result of Europeans switching to a grain-rich diet much lower in protein.

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 them the tallest men on Earth.

Some identical twins are recorded as fraternal at birth, and fraternal ones as identical. A genetic test can easily reveal the true nature of newborn twins, but doctors apparently don't bother with it much. In a 2004 study in Japan, researchers found that hospitals misclassify as many as 30 percent of twins. In the Netherlands, researchers tested the DNA of 327 pairs of twins and then asked their parents what kind of twins they were. Nineteen percent of the parents gave the wrong answer.

When he bred them, he would discover variations among their offspring.