Quotes from Carl Zimmer

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.

Today's Europeans are fairly uniform, genetically speaking. But that uniformity came out of a biological blender.

Thirteen thousand years ago it fell to Antarctica. It rested in the Allan Hills as the Ice Age glaciers retreated, farmers discovered agriculture, cities rose, and rockets shot into space.

Goddard died at age ninety. In their obituary, the Associated Press remembered him for two accomplishments: coining the word moron and discovering the Kallikaks.

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.

The future looks rosy for West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne viruses that follow it to the New World. That's because the future is going to be warm and wet. Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are raising the average temperature in the United States.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's not because HPV was rare—far from it: a 2014 study on 103 healthy people detected the viruses in 71 of them—about 69 percent.

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.

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 after four generations, they found, males kept on developing damaged sperm. Exposures to other chemicals, like DEET and jet fuel, could also alter the rats for generations.

And then, in the middle of one of my blinks, she lunged. Her languid body turned into a missile.

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.

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.

Stwierdzili, ?e komórki synów znajdowaÅ'y siÄ™ w mózgach matek, gdzie rozrosÅ'y siÄ™ i produkowaÅ'y neuroprzeka?niki. Ich synowie pomogli im ksztaÅ'towa? myÅ›li.

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.

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.

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. In another study in Bangladesh, they examined a bat called the Indian flying fox and tried to identify every single virus that calls it home. They identified 55 species, 50 of which are new to science.

Most Americans don't know that in the 1800s, malaria's range swept all the way up the Great Plains into North Dakota, or that in 1901, a fifth of the population of Staten Island carried the parasite.

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.

By one estimate, genealogy has now become the second-most-popular search topic on the Internet. It is outranked only by porn.