She Has Her Mother's Laugh

The genetic nostalgia of the Nazis was so powerful that it even extended to other species. Hermann Göring, Hitler’s most powerful deputy, became a patron of a project to restore the wild ancestors of cattle. Known as aurochs, these giant animals had become extinct in the Middle Ages. Under Göring’s direction, zoologists searched Nazi-held countries for cows that seemed to retain a few vestigial features of aurochs. They bred the cattle, looking among the calves for the ones that appeared to step even further back in time.

Göring’s goal was to release the restored aurochs in Poland, where they would roam one of the last primeval European forests. He pictured himself as a modern Siegfried from Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, hunting the same noble beasts as his Aryan ancestors. To clear the path for his romantic vision, Göring emptied the Polish forests of Jews, Polish resistance fighters, and Soviet partisans.

To test this idea, Doudna and her colleagues tried to cut out a piece of DNA from a jellyfish gene. (The gene is a common tool for molecular biologists, because it makes a glowing protein that can light up a cell like a microscopic jack-o’-lantern.)

As unbroken lines of descent from noble ancestors became more important, leading families paid artists for visual propaganda.

Fireflies carry a gene in their DNA for a protein called luciferin. The insects store luciferin in the cells in their tail

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.

That would simply not do, and so the state legislature tacked on a so-called Pocahontas exception. Even if Virginians were up to one-sixteenth Native American, the revised law held, they would still be considered white. People who were one-sixteenth black, on the other hand, were still black.

veryone alive a thousand years ago who has any descendants today is an ancestor of every living person of European descent.

In 1814 the breeders founded an organization, the title of which was—deep breath—“The Association of Friends, Experts and Supporters of Sheep Breeding for the achievement of a more rapid and more thoroughgoing advancement of this branch of the economy and the manufacturing and commercial aspects of the wool industry that is based upon it.” Those who didn’t want to lose too much oxygen uttering the full name simply called it the Sheep Breeders’ Society

One widespread notion was that new differences arose through experiences—in other words, people could pass down a trait they acquired during their lives. In ancient Rome, for example, there was a prominent family called the Ahenobarbi. Their name means “red beard,” a trait that set them apart in bright contrast to Rome’s dark-haired majority. The Ahenobarbi themselves had started out dark-haired as well, according to legend. But one day, a member of the Ahenobarbi clan, a man named Lucius Domitius, was traveling home to Rome when he encountered the demigods Castor and Pollux (otherwise known as the Gemini twins). They told Domitius to deliver news to Rome that they had won a great battle. And then Castor and Pollux stroked his cheek. With that divine touch, the beard of Domitius turned the color of bronze, and he then passed down his red beard to all his male descendants

“When I talk to a genealogist,” Emerson wrote in his journal in 1855, “I seem to sit up with a corpse.”