Quotes About Carl Zimmer

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.

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.

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

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.

The idea of a pure race is not even a legitimate abstraction," Dobzhansky wrote. "It is a subterfuge to cloak one's ignorance.