Read She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity Online
Authors: Carl Zimmer
“an enormous head . . .”
: Osborn 1915, p. 243.
“the superior organization of the brain . . .”
: Ibid., p. 236.
“The Neanderthals represent a side branch . . .”
: Ibid., p. 257.
“They were armed with weapons . . .”
: Ibid., p. 258.
“probably belonged to the Caucasian stock”
: Ibid., p. 492.
“three absolutely distinct stocks”
: Osborn 1926, p. 4.
“. . . intelligence of the average adult Negro . . .”
: Ibid., p. 5.
“. . . a state of arrested development”
: Ibid., p. 6.
“. . . a 1,250,000-word treatise . . .”
: “Dr. Henry F. Osborn Dies in His Study” 1935.
clear that humans originated in Africa
: Gibbons 2006.
Research on Neanderthals since Osborn's death
: See Roebroeks and Soressi 2016; Villa and Roebroeks 2014.
switched on a sterile electric saw
: Pääbo 2014.
“I am very proud . . .”
: “Find Your Inner Neanderthal” 2011.
“statistical noise”
: Sankararaman et al. 2014.
The earliest hints of interbreeding came to light in 2017
: Posth et al. 2017.
Joshua Akey and his colleagues
: Vernot et al. 2016.
Neanderthal genes that play a role in reproduction
: See Harris et al. 2016; Juric et al. 2016.
Neanderthal immune genes are more common
: Dannemann, Andrés, and Kelso 2016.
the Denisovans
: Reich et al. 2010.
molars dug up in the same Siberian cave
: Slon et al. 2017.
Denisovan DNA was as ill-suited to modern humans
: Sankararaman 2016.
One . . . gene is called EPAS1
: Huerta-Sánchez and Casey 2015.
Emilia Huerta-Sanchez
: Huerta-Sánchez et al. 2014.
Og, king of Bashan
: Wood 1868.
“nine foot high complete”
: Quoted in ibid., p.108.
an Irishman named Charles Byrne
: See Bergland 1965; Muinzer 2014; Wood 1868.
“This truly amazing phenomenon . . .”
: Quoted in Wood 1868, p. 157.
people with dwarfism were also singled out
: Adelson 2005.
entire races of miniature people
: Leroi 2003.
“. . . there must be some peculiarity in Ireland . . .”
: Prichard 1826.
“Such as dwell in places which are low-lying . . .”
: Hippocrates,
On Airs, Waters, and Places
.
“In about five years . . .”
: Aristotle,
On the Generation of Animals.
the Italian physician Pavisi
: Tanner 2010.
“. . . kept some Persons from being turn'd out of the Service”
: Wasse 1724.
The military's cherishing of height
: Hall 2006.
In England, the gap was staggering
: Blum 2016.
“. . . conscience and humanity”
: Quoted in Tanner 2010, p. 548.
“Numbers rule the world”
: Ibid., p. 548.
Quetelet turned his attention to people
: Rose 2015.
“represent all which is grand, beautiful, and excellent”
: Quoted in Hall 2006, p. 229.
“It reigns with serenity . . .”
: Galton 1889, p. 66.
“The large do not always beget the large”
: Ibid., p. 2.
a new way of studying heredity
: Bulmer 2003.
“I had to collect all my data for myself”
: Quoted in Galton 1889, p. 71.
“. . . those who desire to be accurately measured . . .”
: Quoted in Johnson et al. 1985.
Karl Pearson
: Pearson 1895, 1904.
opposite sides of the same coin
: Visscher, McEvoy, and Yang 2010.
heritability feeds the world
: See Khush 1995; Okuno et al. 2014; Peiffer et al. 2014; Teich 1984.
Scientists who study human heritability
: Vinkhuyzen et al. 2013.
“The one element that varies in different individuals . . .”
: Quoted in Galton 1883, p. 173.
Hermann Werner Siemens
: See Boomsma, Busjahn, and Peltonen 2002; Rende, Plomin, and Vandenberg 1990; Siemens 1924.
Karri Silventoinen
: Silventoinen et al. 2003.
11,214 pairs of regular siblings
: Visscher et al. 2007.
“a decrease, however slight, in misery”
: Quoted in Tanner 1979, p. 163.
Gravettian men stood on average six feet tall
: Grasgruber et al. 2014.
When English people emigrated to the American colonies
: Steckel 2009, 2013.
starting around 1870
: Hatton 2014.
Latvian women
: NCD Risk Factor Collaboration 2017.
an international network of researchers
: NCD Risk Factor Collaboration 2016.
Homo erectus
grew as tall as five foot seven
: Gallagher 2013.
Gert Stulp
: Stulp and Barrett 2016.
A child's growing body demands fuel
: Steckel 2016.
Diseases can also stunt a child's growth
: Danaei et al. 2016.
the height of children at age three
: Hübler 2016.
When the Industrial Revolution came
: Craig 2016.
affordable milk and meat
: Hatton 2014.
the size of families shrank
: Dalgaard and Strulik 2016.
36 percent of all two-year-olds
: Danaei et al. 2016.
the country's economic inequality is partly to blame
: Hadhazy 2015.
When Jaime Guevara-Aguirre was growing up
: See Berg et al. 1992; Guevara-Aguirre et al. 2011; Taubes 2013; Rosenbloom et al. 1990.
not what Byrne would have wished for
: Bergland 1965.
“resurrectionists,” as they were known
: Greenfieldboyce 2017.
Harvey Cushing and Arthur Keith
: Keith 1911.
other scientists took X-rays
: Landolt and Zachmann, 1980.
Márta Korbonits
: Leontiou et al. 2008.
this mutation arose in Ireland roughly 2,500 years ago
: Chahal et al. 2011; Radian et al. 2016.
2,327 people from 483 families
: Hirschhorn et al. 2001.
But very often, the links would melt away
: See Egeland et al. 1987; Kelsoe et al. 1989; Robertson 1989.
“Has the genetic study of complex disorders . . .”
: Risch and Merikangras 1996.
a genome-wide association study
: See Price, Spencer, and Donnelly 2015; Visscher et al. 2012, 2010.
age-related macular degeneration
: See Dennis 2003; Klein et al. 2005.
Hoh's findings were later confirmed
: Van Lookeren Campagne, Strauss, and Yaspan 2016.
diseases such as diabetes and arthritis
: Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium 2007.
a gene called HMGA2
: Weedon et al. 2007.
an eight-year-old boy
: Ligon et al. 2005.
examined the height of tens of thousands of people
: Wood et al. 2014.
a study on more than 700,000 people
: Marouli et al. 2017.
Missing heritability dogged many studies
: Nolte et al. 2017.
the geneticist Joseph Nadeau
: Maher 2008.
“Garbage-In Garbage-Out Syndrome”
: See Génin and Clerget-Darpoux 2015.
may be far more than two
: Edwards et al. 2014.
missing heritability is hiding beyond genes
: Ibid.
Animal breeders study the heritability of cows
: See Madrigal 2012; Van Eenennaam 2014.
“negligible”
: Yang et al. 2015.
omnigenic
: Pritchard 2017.
a wealthy British childhood
: See Fancher 1987; Gillham 2001.
Galton inherited that wealth
: See Pearson 1930; Smith 1967.
Maryland's ironworks
: See Lewis 1974; Maryland State Archives 2007.
Guns and slavery grew even more intertwined
: Richards 1980.
“. . . the fruit of God's blessing . . .”
: Quoted in Pearson 1930, p. 41.
“The Trade devolved upon me . . .”
: Quoted in Smith 1967.
“Why, university honors, to be sure”
: Quoted in Fancher 1987, p. 21.
“A mill seemed to be working inside my head”
: Galton 1909, p. 79.
“the highest intellects of their age”
: Ibid., p. 80.
Galton's obsession with heredity
: Browne 2016.
Hereditary Genius
: Galton 1869.
“The average mental grasp . . .”
: Ibid., p. 21.
“even as we inherit their stature, forearm and span”
: Pearson 1904, p. 156.
Goddard's collaborator Lewis Terman
: Fancher 1987.
“The immigrants who have recently come to us . . .”
: Terman 1922.
Porteus found
: Goldstein et al. 2015; Porteus 1937.
a deep-seated feature
: Cooper 2015.
“a catch-all word . . .”
: Haier 2017, p. 11.
whether they can recognize a word like
defenestrate
: Ritchie 2015, p. 26.
best-replicated findings
: Ritchie 2015.
the government of Scotland
: Deary 2009.
“This will change our lives”
: Ibid., p. x.
how efficiently the brain processes information
: Haier 2017; Zimmer 2008b.
a shape flashes on a computer screen
: Grudnik and Kranzler 2001; Osmon and Jackson 2002.
some people needed just 0.02 seconds
: Stough et al. 1996.
half as likely to have died from heart disease
: Calvin 2017.
“system integrity”
: Deary 2012.
“A person can no more be trained to have it . . .”
: Quoted in Goldstein, Princiotta, and Naglieri 2015.
Frank Freeman
: Newman, Freeman, and Holzinger 1937.
referred to only as Ed and Fred
: Fancher 1987.
“We shall be satisfied if we have succeeded . . .”
: Newnan et al. 1937, p. 363.
Cyril Burt
: See Hearnshaw 1979; Mackintosh 1995.
“a thing inborn and not acquired”
: Quoted in Tucker 2007.
“Within ten minutes of starting to read Burt”
: Quoted in Fancher 1987, p. 207.
William Tucker offered an explanation
: Tucker 2007.
“The superior proficiency at Intelligence tests . . .”
: Burt 1909.
twin studies have come to the same conclusion
: McGue and Gottesman 2015.
they drew criticisms of their own
: Kamin and Goldberger 2002; Panofsky 2014.
In a 2015 study
: Fosse, Joseph, and Richardson 2015.
these effects are weak or nonexistent
: Polderman et al. 2015.
Dalton Conley
: Conley et al. 2013.
from smoking to divorce rates to watching television
: Panofsky 2014.
studies of intellectual disorders such as PKU
: Ellison, Rosenfeld, and Shaffer 2013.
“. . . many areas of psychology will be awash . . .”
: Quoted in Plomin and Crabbe 2000.
Michael Egan
: Egan et al. 2001.
failed to find any effect
: Chabris et al. 2012; Plomin, Kennedy, and Craig 2006.
other candidate genes
: Chabris et al. 2012.
Our brains use 84 percent
: Lein and Hawrylycz 2014.
they failed to find even one gene
: Davies et al. 2011.
a staggering 94 percent
: Trzaskowski et al. 2014a.
educational attainment is a modestly heritable trait
: Cesarini and Visscher 2017.
correlated with their educational attainment
: Rietveld et al. 2013.
they reported three variants
: Rietveld et al. 2015.
nearly 80,000 people
: Sniekers 2017.
venturing into a daunting wilderness
: Turkheimer 2012.
They ramify each other
: Turkheimer 2012, 2015.
fetal alcohol syndrome
: Mattson, Corcker, and Nguyen 2011.
vulnerable to toxins such as lead paint
: Skerfving et al. 2015.
Brenda Eskenazi
: Bouchard et al. 2011.
give people iodine
: Feyrer, Politi, and Weil 2013; Zimmermann 2008.
It can also lead to cretinism
: Syed 2015.
neurons crawl to their proper location
: See de Escobar, Obregón, and del Rey 2004.
A third of the world's population
: Li and Eastman 2012.
Sarah Bath
: See Bath et al. 2013; Rayman and Bath 2015.
James Feyrer
: Feyrer et al. 2013.
recruits for World War II
: Pendergrast, Milmore, and Marcus 1961.
Robert DeLong
: See DeLong 2010; O'Donnell et al. 2002.
“We are driven to the absurd conclusion . . .”
: Quoted in Flynn 2009.
Alan Kaufman
: Kaufman et al. 2014.
Our behaviors are shaped by our experiences
: Nisbett 2013.
Christian Brinch and Taryn Ann Galloway
: Brinch and Galloway 2012.
the enrollment rate in the early 1900s was 50 percent
: Baker et al. 2015.
Eric Turkheimer
: Turkheimer et al. 2003.
although others have not
: Tucker-Drob and Bates 2016.
measuring their heritability at different ages
: Haworth et al. 2010.
“For the last forty years”
: Pearson 1904, p. 160.
German psychiatrists
: Burleigh 2001, p. 366.
“It is quite possible that he has never had the chance . . .”
: Ibid., p. 356.