Skip to main content

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh by Carl Zimmer review – the latest thinking on heredity

What do we pass on from generation to generation? This deeply researched book explores the murky past of genetic research as well as its fast-moving present

Genealogy is apparently the second most searched subject on the internet … after the obvious. Now that we can map our genes, we want to know where we come from. But heredity is not as simple as the passing on of traits from parents to offspring: mothers can acquire cells from their own children; race “is not a feature of the natural world beyond our social experience”; we can chop up DNA to replace the bits we don’t like; and a lot of those genealogy sites are nonsense.

In this painstakingly researched book, the science writer Carl Zimmer takes a long view of heredity. Stories of how discoveries were made often start with farming and plants (Mendel’s peas) and continue via unusual humans (the Habsburg jaw) before being proved or disproved by DNA sequencing, and then potentially rethought as knowledge increases. Mini-biographies paint powerful pictures. Emma Wolverton, born in 1889, was sent away by her impoverished family to the Vineland training school for “feebleminded children”. Henry Goddard, who ran the institution, traced her family tree and found evidence, he thought, that the mental deficiency was hereditary. His popular book The Kallikak Family inspired a young man called Adolf Hitler. The Nazis’ eugenics programme was based on research that turned out to be completely false.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2QfFkTq

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs
Post a Comment
Read more