Quotes from Carl Zimmer

Many American women go without prenatal care during pregnancy, while expectant mothers in the Netherlands get free house calls from nurses.

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.

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

Burbank might produce thousands of hybrid offspring from which he might pick just a few to propagate into a new generation.

It is true that humans have physical differences, and some of those differences are spread geographically across the plant. But clinging to old notions about race won't help us understand the nature of those differences—both the ones we can see and the ones we can't.

It is true that humans have physical differences, and some of those differences are spread geographically across the planet. But clinging to old notions about race won't help us understand the nature of those differences—both the ones we can see and the ones we can't.

When Nature Neuroscience published Dias's study on memories of smells, they put a picture of Lamarck on the cover, complete with a thatch of gray hair and a high cravat. New

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

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.

All told, a cell may need three weeks to finish meiosis.

If heredity is a kind of memory, methylation suffers radical amnesia in every generation.

What we're not so good at is getting rid of viruses. Despite all the vaccines, antiviral drugs, and public health strategies at our disposal, viruses still manage to escape annihilation.

HIV infections, for example, have declined in the United States, but fifty thousand Americans still acquire the virus every year.

Our own lineage split off from that of chimpanzees roughly seven million years ago.

In the 1400s, people began to use a new word to define a group of animals that shared the same blood: a race.

Over the past three thousand years, smallpox may have killed more people than any other disease on Earth.

Careful imitation could also explain why hand axes managed to stay so similar to each other for over a million years. If Homo erectus simply looked over old hand axes to guess how to make them, they would have accidentally introduced little variations to their craft. Over a few thousand years, those mismatches would have caused the hand ax to drift far away from its original shape.

Between 1400 and 1800, smallpox killed an estimated five hundred million people every century in Europe alone.

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.

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.

We use words like sister and aunt as if they describe rigid laws of biology. But despite our genetic essentialism, these laws are really only rules of thumb. Under the right conditions, they can be readily broken.

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.

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.

The concept of genes driving people's appetite caused them to lose some control of their own.