What is behavioral genetics?
[text provided by Joseph McInerney] Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) was the first scientist to study heredity and human behavior systematically. The term “genetics” did not even appear until 1909, only 2 years before Galton’s death. With or without a formal name, the study of heredity always has been, at its core, the study of biological variation. Human behavioral genetics, a relatively new field, seeks to understand both the genetic and environmental contributions to individual variations in human behavior. This is not an easy task, for the following reasons. • It often is difficult to define the behavior in question. Intelligence is a classic example. Is intelligence the ability to solve a certain type of problem? The ability to make one’s way successfully in the world? The ability to score well on an IQ test? During the late summer of 1999, a Princeton molecular biologist published the results of impressive research in which he enhanced the ability of mice to learn by inserting a ge
