Following on from my James D. Watson link, yesterday a colleague of mine lobbed me a review copy of DNA and the Criminal Justice System by David Lazer. Click the smaller image below to see an interesting diagram it reproduces from a textbook in use in the early half of the twentieth century (unfortunately it’s impossible to give a more precise date from the context).
[click to enlarge]
Gossip has that, at the peak of the race to sequence the human genome, the acute shortage of manually dexterous workers needed to make the “final push” for the sequence was answered by another Nobelist (and bearded real ale drinker) hiring lots of barmaids to work on the project. But I wouldn’t repeat gossip here.
The “Quaker-descended” girl in the top row by herself looks rather like the barmaid – there may have been some more interesting and scientifically significant mingling of DNA going on there…
I saw a textbook from the ’20s which asserted that short hair turns women into lesbians. The nature vs coiffure argument – if only it were that easy.
The textbook could have been from as late as 1961!
What if he married a feeble-minded Quaker-descended girl and produced 7 idiotic morally-upright children… who then proceeded to rule over the little horrors/ demonic multitude?