Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics by Adam Rutherford
Author:Adam Rutherford [Rutherford, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00
* Sperm observed by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in 1677; eggs by Karl Ernst von Baer in 1827.
â This maxim was not Darwinâs but that of the philosopher and biologist Herbert Spencer. I donât like it much because it became tautologous as evolutionary biology developed: fitness is a term used to quantify the ability of an organism to contribute its genes to the next generation. Therefore, it sort of means âsurvival of the individuals that survive.â Nevertheless, Darwin adopted it as an alternative phrase for natural selection, and added it to the fifth edition of The Origin of Species in 1869.
â¡ In a footnote in his 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development: âWe greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea.â
§ In fact, it was a recording of the previous dayâs weather, published in The Times on April 1, 1875.
¶ Basic tools of statistics such as standard deviation, correlation coefficients and regression lines were either invented or developed by Galton to process his ideas and add data-driven evidence.
# Possibly influenced by Prosperoâs lament for Caliban in The Tempest: âa born devil on whose nature Nurture can never stick.â
** Some frequently used data sets selected by the controversial intelligence researcher Richard Lynn that purport to represent national IQsâincluding those that claim to show many sub-Saharan African countries having significantly lower averages than European countriesâare meaningless, invalid, and absurd. For example, the national IQ for Botswana in the NIQ_QNWSAS data set is 69.5, but upon inspection, this number was arrived at with a single sample of 104 natively Tswana-speaking high-school students aged seventeen to twenty, tested in English, and thus not comparable with that of other countries. For Somalia (measured at IQ 67.7): a single sample of refugees aged eight to eighteen tested in a Kenyan refugee camp; and so on. Nevertheless, these data are unquestioningly cited as valid by dozens if not hundreds of peer-reviewed academic papers, despite their fatal flaws.
â â Larmarckian inheritance is sometimes mocked for its stupidity. We now know that the giraffe did not get a long neck because it strives to get the juiciest leaves, and the offspring of blacksmiths donât have bigger muscles because their father smashed iron all his life. Evolutionary change does not act on characteristics that are acquired during life. Lamarck was a good scientist and his ideas do not deserve to be mocked. He was wrong, and scientists should always be very happy to be wrong.
â¡â¡ During the writing of this book, I was continually bewildered by the recapitulations of history in the present, even the repetition of the same language.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi(7280)
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker(5668)
Paper Towns by Green John(4179)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot(3835)
The Sports Rules Book by Human Kinetics(3602)
Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery by Eric Franklin(3505)
ACSM's Complete Guide to Fitness & Health by ACSM(3476)
Kaplan MCAT Organic Chemistry Review: Created for MCAT 2015 (Kaplan Test Prep) by Kaplan(3431)
Introduction to Kinesiology by Shirl J. Hoffman(3308)
Livewired by David Eagleman(3140)
The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks(3000)
Alchemy and Alchemists by C. J. S. Thompson(2918)
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen(2912)
Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio(2748)
Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre(2738)
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee(2502)
Kaplan MCAT Behavioral Sciences Review: Created for MCAT 2015 (Kaplan Test Prep) by Kaplan(2495)
The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (The Princeton History of the Ancient World) by Kyle Harper(2444)
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee(2440)