Help With Behavioral Genetics At Psychology Online

Behavioral genetics is a branch of biology that involves studying the role of genetics in animal behavior. The field is often associated with the concept of “nature versus nuture.” It involves other fields of discipline such as genetics, ethology, psychology, and statistics. It was Sir Francis Galton who first thought of systematically studying heredity and human behavior.
The term “genetics” was not used until 1909, a couple of years before Galton died. Even without a formal name, the study of heredity has always involved biological variation. It is an entirely new field that attempts to develop an understanding genetic and environmental factors that often lead to individual variations in human behavior. However, there are several reasons which make the task of understanding behavior difficult.
First, it can be challenging to have a definition of behavior. A good example is intelligence. It could refer to the ability of the individual to solve a problem or the capacity to get an excellent score in an IQ test. A Princeton molecular biologist in the late summer of 1999 published the results of a research wherein the ability of a mice to learn was enhanced by inserting a genetic code for a protein that has a connection with memory.
In the said study, experimental animals fared much better than the control on a series of traditional experiments of learning prompting the biologist to call it “smart gene” or “IQ gene.” The truth of the matter is there is no universal definition of intelligence.
After coming up with a definition for the purpose of research, the investigator is still required to conduct a valid and reliable measurement of behavior. It could be difficult to measure basic personality traits such as shyness or assertiveness, which is a product of current research. It is interesting to note that there is a conflation of definition and measurement where the scores obtained in the tests itself has reached a definition of the trait measured.
Another factor involved in the difficulty in understanding behavior is that behavior like complex traits involve several genes, which can make matters complicated in searching for genetic contributions.
Like other genetic research, any study involving genes and behavior may involve analysis of families and populations in comparing individuals who have the trait with those who do not have. This is where a question of “heritability” comes in. Explaining heritability figures is quite restricted by the population under study and the existing environment during the conduct of the study.
In general, however, any change in the population or change in the environment will also result to change in the heritability as well. Statements of heritability offer no basis for predicting the possible trait of any individual. Information about psychology online can be obtained in Psychology Fitness.

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