She Has Her Mother's Laugh Quotes

“Intelligence is far from blood types. While test scores are unquestionably heritable, their heritability is not 100 percent. It sits instead somewhere near the middle of the range of possibilities. While identical twins often end up with similar test scores, sometimes they don’t. If you get average scores on intelligence tests, it’s entirely possible your children may turn out to be geniuses. And if you’re a genius, you should be smart enough to recognize your children may not follow suit. Intelligence is not a thing to will to your descendants like a crown.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“The stubborn inequalities in the Unites States are not the result of some people living in a physical environment. Their environment is built by social forces, and those forces last for centuries because they are regenerated across the generations.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

“Poverty may be powerful enough to swamp the influence of variants in our DNA.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“They found that the fetal cells from their sons reached their brains, sprouted branches, and pumped out neurotransmitters. Their sons helped shape their thoughts.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“The idea of a pure race is not even a legitimate abstraction,” Dobzhansky wrote. “It is a subterfuge to cloak one’s ignorance.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“Reviewing the records of two million recruits, Feyrer and his colleagues also checked the natural iodine levels in their hometowns. Nationwide, the researchers found, the introduction of iodine raised the average IQ by an estimated 3.5 points. And in the parts of the country where natural iodine levels were lowest, Feyrer and his colleagues estimated that scores leaped 15 points. It may be hard to believe that such a straightforward change in people’s diets could have such a tremendous effect on intelligence. But as public health workers continue to bring iodine to more of the world, the same jumps happen. In 1990, Robert DeLong, an expert on iodine at Duke University, traveled to the Taklamakan Desert in western China. The region has extremely low levels of iodine in the soil, and the people in the region have resisted attempts to introduce iodized salt. It didn’t help that the people of the region, the Uyghurs, distrusted the government in Beijing. Rumors spread that government-issued iodized salt had contraceptives in it, as a way to wipe out the community. DeLong and his Chinese medical colleagues approached local officials with a different idea: They would put iodine in the irrigation canals. Crops would absorb it in their water, and people in the Taklamakan region would eat it in their food. The officials agreed to the plan, and when DeLong later gave children from the region IQ tests, their average score jumped 16 points.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“Among children who grew up in affluent families, the heritability was about 60 percent. But twins from poorer families showed no greater correlation than other siblings. Their heritability was close to zero.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“He might breed them for years before reaching the proper form. After a few years of breeding a type of lily, Burbank found a single specimen that met his standards. A rabbit ate it.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“In 1950, a thirty-year-old scientist named Rosalind Franklin arrived at King’s College London to study the shape of DNA. She and a graduate student named Raymond Gosling created crystals of DNA, which they bombarded with X-rays. The beams bounced off the crystals and struck photographic film, creating telltale lines, spots, and curves. Other scientists had tried to take pictures of DNA, but no one had created pictures as good as Franklin had. Looking at the pictures, she suspected that DNA was a spiral-shaped molecule—a helix. But Franklin was relentlessly methodical, refusing to indulge in flights of fancy before the hard work of collecting data was done. She kept taking pictures. Two other scientists, Francis Crick and James Watson, did not want to wait. Up in Cambridge, they were toying with metal rods and clamps, searching for plausible arrangements of DNA. Based on hasty notes Watson had written during a talk by Franklin, he and Crick put together a new model. Franklin and her colleagues from King’s paid a visit to Cambridge to inspect it, and she bluntly told Crick and Watson they had gotten the chemistry all wrong. Franklin went on working on her X-ray photographs and growing increasingly unhappy with King’s. The assistant lab chief, Maurice Wilkins, was under the impression that Franklin was hired to work directly for him. She would have none of it, bruising Wilkins’s ego and leaving him to grumble to Crick about “our dark lady.” Eventually a truce was struck, with Wilkins and Franklin working separately on DNA. But Wilkins was still Franklin’s boss, which meant that he got copies of her photographs. In January 1953, he showed one particularly telling image to Watson. Now Watson could immediately see in those images how DNA was shaped. He and Crick also got hold of a summary of Franklin’s unpublished research she wrote up for the Medical Research Council, which guided them further to their solution. Neither bothered to consult Franklin about using her hard-earned pictures. The Cambridge and King’s teams then negotiated a plan to publish a set of papers in Nature on April 25, 1953. Crick and Watson unveiled their model in a paper that grabbed most of the attention. Franklin and Gosling published their X-ray data in another paper, which seemed to readers to be a “me-too” effort. Franklin died of cancer five years later, while Crick, Watson, and Wilkins went on to share the Nobel prize in 1962. In his 1968 book, The Double Helix, Watson would cruelly caricature Franklin as a belligerent, badly dressed woman who couldn’t appreciate what was in her pictures. That bitter fallout is a shame, because these scientists had together discovered something of exceptional beauty. They had found a molecular structure that could make heredity possible.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“Everybody’s genome is like a book with 23 chapters,” he told them. “You have two copies of each chapter, one from your dad and one from your mom. Whole genome sequencing looks for everything. It looks for missing chapters, missing paragraphs, every misspelled word.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“The people of cold countries generally, and particularly those of Europe, are full of spirit, but deficient in skill and intelligence,” Aristotle declared. They were therefore unfit to govern themselves or others. Asians had skill and intelligence, but lacked spirit, which was why they lived under the rule of despots. “The Greeks, intermediate in geographical position, unite the qualities of both sets of peoples,” Aristotle wrote.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“Po naszej śmierci – pisał Dawkins – pozostają po nas dwie rzeczy: geny i memy”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

“Trudno wyobrazić sobie, że rak ma cokolwiek wspólnego z różowym grapefruitem. A jednak oba są produktami mozaicyzmu: żywych linii komórkowych różniących się od reszty ciała mutacjami, które odziedziczyły po komórkach macierzystych.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

“Stwierdzili, że komórki synów znajdowały się w mózgach matek, gdzie rozrosły się i produkowały neuroprzekaźniki. Ich synowie pomogli im kształtować myśli.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

“It’s also becoming clear that we can’t treat genes and the environment as two distinct forces that act independently of each other. Each one influences the other. In 2003, Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia and his colleagues gave a twist to the standard studies on twins. To calculate the heritability of intelligence, they decided not to just look at the typical middle-class families who were the subject of earlier studies. They looked for twins from poorer families, too. Turkheimer and his colleagues found that the socioeconomic class determined how heritable intelligence was. Among children who grew up in affluent families, the heritability was about 60 percent. But twins from poorer families showed no greater correlation than other siblings. Their heritability was close to zero. It may seem weird that the environment itself can change heritability. We tend to think of genes as rigid purveyors of destiny, the inescapable agents of heredity. But biologists have always known that the two are intimately linked together. If you raise corn in uniformly healthy soil, with the same level of abundant sunlight and water, the variation in their height will largely be the product of the variation in their genes. But if you plant them in a bad soil, where they may or may not get enough of some vital nutrient, the environment will be responsible for more of their differences. Turkheimer’s study hints that something similar happens to intelligence. By focusing their research on affluent families—or on countries such as Norway, where people get universal health care—intelligence researchers may end up giving too much credit to heredity. Poverty may be powerful enough to swamp the influence of variants in our DNA.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“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.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“Scientists developed twin studies as a way to study human DNA in an age when it was impossible to examine it directly. Once it became possible to read genetic markers in people’s genomes, new ways emerged to measure heritability. Peter Visscher and his colleagues found that pairs of siblings can vary tremendously in their genetic similarity, sharing as little as 30 percent of their genetic variants in common to as much as 64 percent. If a trait is highly heritable, Visscher reasoned, then it should be more similar in siblings who have more DNA in common. In 2007, Visscher and his colleagues examined the height of 11,214 pairs of regular siblings. They found that “twin-like” siblings—those who shared more than half of their DNA—tended to grow to more similar heights. Siblings with less genetic similarity were not so similar. The scientists used these correlations to calculate the heritability of height. They ended up with an estimate of 86 percent. That’s an exceptionally high figure. Nicotine dependence has a heritability of 60 percent. The age at which women go into menopause is 47 percent. Left-handedness is at a mere 26 percent. In the world of heritability, height stands tall. —”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“Heritability is one of the trickiest concepts in modern biology. It describes variations only across an entire population. If the heritability of a trait in a group of people is 50 percent, that doesn’t mean that in any given person, genes and environment are each responsible for half of it. And if a trait has a heritability of zero, that doesn’t mean that genes have nothing to do with it. The heritability of the number of eyes is zero, because children are virtually all born with a pair of them. When we walk down the street, we don’t pass someone with five eyes, another with eight, and another with thirty-one. If someone has only one eye, it’s probably because they lost the other one in an accident or from an infection. Yet we all inherit a genetic program that guides the development of eyes.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“When Richard Cooper went to medical school at the University of Arkansas in the late 1960s, he was stunned at how many of his black patients were suffering from high blood pressure. He would encounter people in their forties and fifties felled by strokes that left them institutionalized. When Cooper did some research on the problem, he learned that American doctors had first noted the high rate of hypertension in American blacks decades earlier. Cardiologists concluded it must be the result of genetic differences between blacks and whites. Paul Dudley White, the preeminent American cardiologist of the early 1900s, called it a “racial predisposition,” speculating that the relatives of American blacks in West Africa must suffer from high blood pressure as well. Cooper went on to become a cardiologist himself, conducting a series of epidemiological studies on heart disease. In the 1990s, he finally got the opportunity to put the racial predisposition hypothesis to the test. Collaborating with an international network of doctors, Cooper measured the blood pressure of eleven thousand people. Paul Dudley White, it turned out, was wrong. Farmers in rural Nigeria and Cameroon actually had substantially lower blood pressure than American blacks, Cooper found. In fact, they had lower blood pressure than white Americans, too. Most surprisingly of all, Cooper found that people in Finland, Germany, and Spain had higher blood pressure than American blacks. Cooper’s findings don’t challenge the fact that genetic variants can increase people’s risk of developing high blood pressure. In fact, Cooper himself has helped run studies that have revealed some variants in African Americans and Nigerians that can raise that risk. But this genetic inheritance does not, on its own, explain the experiences of African and European Americans. To understand their differences, doctors need to examine the experiences of blacks and whites in the United States—the stress of life in high-crime neighborhoods and the difficulty of getting good health care, for example. These are powerful inheritances, too, but they’re not inscribed in DNA. For scientists carrying out the hard work of disentangling these influences, an outmoded biological concept of race offers no help. In the words of the geneticists Noah Rosenberg and Michael Edge, it has become “a sideshow and a distraction.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“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.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“In 2006, Peter Visscher, a geneticist at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Australia, and his colleagues studied 4,401 pairs of siblings, examining several hundred genetic markers in each volunteer. The siblings often had a series of identical genetic markers along a chromosome—segments they inherited from one of their parents. On average, they found about half of the DNA in the siblings was made up of these identical stretches. But many of the siblings deviated from a perfect 50 percent. At the high end, the researchers found a pair of siblings who shared 61.7 percent of their DNA. At the low end was a pair of siblings who shared only 37.4 percent. Along the spectrum of inheritance, in other words, some of our siblings are more like our identical twins, others more like cousins.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“All told, a cell may need three weeks to finish meiosis.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“Goddard brought his team of fieldworkers to Ellis Island on a series of trips, starting in 1912. When ships docked and immigrants shuffled into the main building on the island, Goddard’s fieldworkers scanned them. They pointed out those who looked like they might be feebleminded. The selected immigrants were pulled out of the crowd and taken to a side room. There, another fieldworker and an interpreter would give each immigrant a series of tasks, such as fitting blocks into holes or telling them what year it was. Goddard’s staff kept careful records of the tests, which he analyzed back in Vineland. The results stunned him: A huge proportion of the immigrants tested as feebleminded. Goddard broke down the results by ethnic group: 79 percent of Italians were feebleminded, 83 percent of Jews, 87 percent of Russians”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“We have the technology right now to effectively eradicate Huntington's disease from the planet, along with many other genetic disorders. But the messy realities of human existence--of economics, emotions, politics, and the rest--override the technological possibilities.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

“After a few years of breeding a type of lily, Burbank found a single specimen that met his standards. A rabbit ate it.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

“In fact, there's no single species of bacteria that we humans all share. We house personalized zoos.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

“We humans have 23 pairs, but pea plants have only 7. Yeast have 16. Some butterflies have 134.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“A virus does not reproduce by copying its own genes and dividing in two. Instead, it invades a host cell.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“When a cell divides, it needs another army of molecules to make a second copy of its DNA.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become

“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.”
― Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become