Smart people can have really bad ideas – like selectively breeding human beings to improve the species. Put into practice, Galton's concept proved discriminatory, damaging, even deadly.
Governments will need to determine how best to allocate COVID-19 vaccinations.
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When allocating resources, we prioritize members of the social groups we belong to, rather than including others in our allocations. This will determine how the COVID-19 vaccine is distributed.
W.E.B. Du Bois in his office at The Crisis in New York City, 1925.
W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries
As editor of the magazine for 24 years, Du Bois featured articles about biology, evolution, archaeology in Africa and more to refute the rampant scientific racism of the early 20th century.
In the Pacific Northwest, even though there are huge variations in environment, the Douglas fir grows everywhere.
NASA/NOAA
Local adaptation allows plants and animals to thrive in a diversity of places. Sometimes adaptation sharpens patterns of where organisms live, but 85% of the time, it creates a more homogeneous world.
In the television show 'The Handmaid's Tale,' Charles Darwin's 'Descent of Man' makes a cameo — and its appearance makes a comment on how Gilead functions.
Darwin wondered: what if species change over time in response to their environment?
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Quentin Wheeler, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry; Antonio G. Valdecasas, CSIC - Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, and Cristina Cánovas, CSIC - Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
If you go by editorial cartoons and T-shirts, you might have the impression that evolution proceeds as an orderly march toward a preordained finish line. But that's not right at all.
There is an urgent need to reconsider the importance of diversity. It is not a simple wealth. It is both a property of the living and an essential condition for its survival.
Nature doesn't always make the things we need so three Nobel Prize winners figured out how to fast-track evolution in the lab to create medicines, biofuels and industrial chemicals for modern life.
Down House: the home (and garden) of Charles Darwin.
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Was Darwin inspired by the tropical wildlife of his travels to discover natural selection? Actually, pigeons, worms and barnacles were far more prominent in his thinking.
Some of the ‘remarkable beetles’ Wallace collected in Borneo.
A. R. Wallace
An evolutionary biologist visits the remote jungle mountaintop where a little-known naturalist wrote his insightful paper about the mechanisms of evolution that spurred on a rivalrous Charles Darwin.
Harnessing the awe-inspiring living light and power of bioluminescent organisms could change the human world.
A stick insect in Borneo: variation and natural selection has resulted in insects with the astonishing ability to mimic features in their natural environment.
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In this age of the pseudo-factual, its more important than ever to acquaint ourselves with the foundations of the scientific tradition, such as Darwin's Origin of Species.
The short answer is no. An individual of one species cannot, during its lifetime, turn into another species. But your question helps us think about life, evolution and what it means to be human.
Chief Executive Officer, Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research; Professorial Fellow, Fenner School for the Environment and Society, Australian National University