Breeding: The Human History of Heredity, Race, and Sex

Breeding charts more than two thousand years of ideas about the nature of sex and heredity. From the speculations of the ancient, medieval and early modern worlds to the birth of genetics in the modern age, John Waller examines how we came to solve one of the greatest of enigmas: why offspring tend to look like their parents. But this book goes further than telling a story of scientific advance. It also explores the social and political realities which often determined how people used the c...