Going to Extremes: Researching the Causes of Schizophrenia
The sources for complex psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia involve looking for contributions from many different gene variants. These gene combinations do not exhibit the cognitive impairment that characterizes the disease until the brain reac...
The Search for Intelligence: Environmental and Genetic Influences on Intelligence
Intelligence represents an interaction between genes and environment. Genes for abilities may not be totally additive, a concept known as emergenesis. Hundreds of genes may contribute a small amount of variance to a particular trait like reading dis...
Different Strokes: How Influential is the Shared Family Environment?
The environment is the nature portion of the human equation-those factors along with genetics that shape the emerging individual. From the time of Freud, it was assumed that the shared family environment was primarily responsible for similarities ...
Codes of Life: Gene-Environment Interaction
Using twin and adoption studies, behavior geneticists can mathematically estimate the degree to which variation among individuals can be attributed to their differing genes. The concept is heritability, the extent to which genes predispose certain...
Codes of Life: Genes-Our Biological Blueprint
Genes are DNA segments that provide the code for assembling protein molecules, the building blocks of human development. All of our abilities and behaviors have some genetic component. Whether or not the genes get turned on or off may depend the...