PSYC 2600 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Human Genome Project, Peripheral Nervous System, Human Genome
1 Feb 2018
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Psyc2600 week 4 genetics and personality. What is heritability: proportion of phenotypic variance that is attributable to genetic variance, environmentality: proportion of observed variance in group of individuals attributable to environmental variance. Or: heritability cannot be applied to single individual, heritability is not constant or immutable, heritability is not a precise statistic. Nature-nurture debate: no such debate at the individual level, influence of genes and of environment is only relevant for the discussion of group-level variation. Behavioral genetics methods: selective breeding, family studies, twin studies, adoption studies, can only occur if a desired trait is heritable, selective breeding studies of dogs, cannot be ethically conducted with humans. Family studies: correlates the degree of genetic overlap among family members with the degree of similarity in personality trait. Problem: members of a family who share the same genes also usually share the same environment confounds genetic with environmental influences, thus, family studies are never definitive.
