* Punching racists is not necessarily something that I would encourage or endorse.

* No relation.

^† This is not uncommon among Jews. I have a friend who is a Cohen, but not because of a long tradition of priesthood as is typically the case. It is merely that upon arrival in the UK in the nineteenth century from eastern Europe, unable to speak English to immigration officials, their Jewishness was established, and Cohen was assigned as a typically Jewish name. Similarly, I have friends with the surnames Gee and Kay, because having an obviously Jewish name like Ginsberg in the 1930s was potentially dangerous, and names such as Krupnik were perceived as being difficult. Both were simply shortened to the first letter.

* Where Carl Linneaus lived and died, having reinvented biology and specifically the system by which we classify all living things.

^† I believe the geography of my son’s birth qualifies him as a Cockney.

^‡ Becoming a scientist and a museum curator, respectively, rather than dancers surely answers this pressing question.

* Modern genetics is inextricably enmeshed with statistics. Evolutionary biology enjoyed a giant boost in the first half of the twentieth century when math and statistics were applied to Darwin’s ideas of natural selection by some of the finest scientists ever to have drawn breath, many of whom held deeply unpleasant views—the names Pearson and Spearman will be familiar to anyone who has dallied with statistics in their lives. In the era of genomics, statistics plays an even more pivotal role in uncovering the relationship of human populations to each other, but nowadays most statisticians are not appalling racists.

* The full title (of the sixth edition sitting on a shelf to my right; other editions vary) is The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Note the word races; in this contemporary context the word is used in a way that we no longer accept, meaning something akin to breeds, or subspecies or simply types of organism. I point this out because superficial critics of both far-right and antiracist sensibilities have attempted in public and private correspondence to use this as some sort of criticism or propaganda for their causes. If they had made it past the title, and all the way to the final chapter, they would know that Darwin mentions humans just once in that great book, quoted as the epigram at the very beginning of this book, and there only to ponder what his theory means for us bald apes.

* Darwin’s interest in aquatic crustaceans was such that one of his sons reportedly expressed puzzlement that all fathers did not have such an extensive barnacle collection, asking a friend, “Where does your father do his barnacles?” This has been attributed to Leonard, George, and Francis Darwin, making me think that maybe none of them said it. The Darwin Correspondence Project curates his voluminous writings, and was unable to confirm a specific son, so I think it falls into the very well-stocked category of Darwin apocrypha.

^† In fact, it was the previous day’s weather, in the Times, April 1, 1875, and not a joke.

* You could of course simply take the hat off if your head is hot. But these were Victorian times, and I presume a hatless man would be considered unacceptable, immoral, and possibly criminal.

^† Which, purely by coincidence, is where I worked for more than a decade.

^‡ Darwin trivia: Emma’s nickname for Charles was “Nigger.” “My own dear Nigger,” she would write in their correspondence—they wrote to each other frequently, even when living under the same roof. This nickname is probably a Victorian term of affection connected with slavery, denoting fond ownership. Still, a bit weird to our ears.

* Who, purely by coincidence, was Jacob Cohen, maternal grandfather of Rosalind Franklin, whose work was the foundation of Crick and Watson’s landmark work in determining the structure of DNA. In another delicious coincidence, the last published work by Charles Darwin, in Nature in April 1882, concerned some work by a Nottingham-based amateur scientist on barnacles and freshwater winkles; his name was Walter Drawbridge Crick, grandfather of Francis. If biological family trees are messy and webbed, academic family trees are often bizarrely matted.

* In his pocket, he carried a tool he called a “pricker”—a thimble with a mounted needle, so he could mark female beauty on a paper simply by fumbling in his trousers, and thus absolutely avoiding the appearance of being a massive pricker-wielding pervert.

^† Which, purely by coincidence, my sister now helps curate.

* Mendel was also a monk, as is often mentioned. I prefer to refer to his world-changing sciencing, rather than his competent monkery.

* Ludwik Hirschfeld revealed his own prejudices and stereotyping in the methods he used to coax the blood samples from soldiers. “It was enough to tell the English the objectives were scientific,” he wrote in his autobiography. “We permitted ourselves to kid our French friends by telling them we could find out with whom they could sin with impunity. We told the Negroes that the blood tests would show who deserved leave, immediately, they willingly stretched out their black hands to us.”

* Largely absent, though present in many other populations of non–East Asian descent, including Berbers, Inuits, Scandinavians, Poles, and indigenous Americans. Furthermore, there are visible differences in epicanthic fold shape between the different people of Southeast Asia to the extent that many people can distinguish between Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, and so on, solely on this basis. People with Down syndrome frequently exhibit epicanthic folds that were thought in the nineteenth century to be similar to those of the people of Mongolia. Hence, those with Down syndrome were known as Mongoloid or Mongol for more than a century. “Mong” was a playground insult when I was growing up, but is now considered offensive, and no sensible people still use it.

* These are both real suggestions from academic papers. The pink thing is complete nonsense for a couple of reasons: the first is that the gender preferences for pink are a twentieth-century phenomenon. The color schemes in Victorian children’s bedrooms were frequently pink for boys, blue for girls. The second is that there is no evidence that women acted as the gatherers and not the hunters. As for babies crying to prevent parental sex, yes, it does have that effect, as every parent will know. I’m not sure it’s the definitive reason though.

* For example, in the impressively angry 1992 B-side “Hit ’Em Up” by Tupac.

* Probably. The earliest incarnation of this thought is in Oscar Wilde’s 1887 jolly horror story “The Canterville Ghost”: “Indeed, in many respects, she was quite English, and was an excellent example of the fact that we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

* Horror movie fans will well know the face of Michael Berryman, whose striking features made him a staple freak in films such as The Crow and Weird Science, and a mental health inpatient in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975. That look, leering down from the VHS cover of the 1980s horror film The Hills Have Eyes (and its lesser sequel) is classic hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, and will be terribly familiar to anyone who, like me, haunted video rental shops in their misspent youth.

* Which is called Creation: The Origin of Life & The Future of Life (Viking, 2013).

* This was found, via Twitter, via the Google Books text search algorithm. I haven’t read it. Ulysses by James Joyce has the character Molly Bloom, who is drawn from his wife, Nora Barnacle. Ulysses also mentions beagles, but of course that is fiction, and far more difficult to understand than genomics.

* Moreover, while success of black athletes was frequently put down to biology, success of white athletes was attributed to hard work and cognitive abilities. Interestingly, these views are not consistent over time though. In the first third of the twentieth century, the 5,000 meters was utterly dominated by Finnish athletes. A German writer named Jack Schumacher wrote that “Running is certainly in the blood of every Finn . . . [They] are like animals in the forest,” as part of a diatribe of Aryan superiority.