Hall's 1951 book chapter on behavioural genetics, in which he introduced the term "psychogenetics", which enjoyed some limited popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. The field once again gained status as a distinct scientific discipline through the publication of early texts on behavioural genetics, such as Calvin S. Behavioural genetics was thereby discredited through its association to eugenics. The eugenics movement was subsequently discredited by scientific corruption and genocidal actions in Nazi Germany. The primary idea behind eugenics was to use selective breeding combined with knowledge about the inheritance of behaviour to improve the human species. The field of behavioural genetics, as founded by Galton, was ultimately undermined by another of Galton's intellectual contributions, the founding of the eugenics movement in 20th century society. Through his work, Galton also "introduced multivariate analysis and paved the way towards modern Bayesian statistics" that are used throughout the sciences-launching what has been dubbed the "Statistical Enlightenment". While Galton could not rule out the role of environmental influences on eminence, a fact which he acknowledged, the study served to initiate an important debate about the relative roles of genes and environment on behavioural characteristics. In this work, Galton found that the rate of "eminence" was highest among close relatives of eminent individuals, and decreased as the degree of relationship to eminent individuals decreased. In 1869, 10 years after Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Galton published his results in Hereditary Genius. One of Galton's investigations involved a large pedigree study of social and intellectual achievement in the English upper class. Galton was a polymath who studied many subjects, including the heritability of human abilities and mental characteristics. Modern-day behavioural genetics began with Sir Francis Galton, a nineteenth-century intellectual and cousin of Charles Darwin. Behavioural genetic concepts also existed during the English renaissance, where William Shakespeare perhaps first coined the phrase " nature versus nurture" in The Tempest, where he wrote in Act IV, Scene I, that Caliban was "A devil, a born devil, on whose nature Nurture can never stick". Plato, for example, argued in The Republic that selective breeding among the citizenry to encourage the development of some traits and discourage others, what today might be called eugenics, was to be encouraged in the pursuit of an ideal society. Plato and Aristotle each speculated on the basis and mechanisms of inheritance of behavioural characteristics. Selective breeding and the domestication of animals is perhaps the earliest evidence that humans considered the idea that individual differences in behaviour could be due to natural causes. Environmental influences also play a strong role, but they tend to make family members more different from one another, not more similar.įarmers with wheat and cattle - Ancient Egyptian art 1,422 BCE displaying domesticated animals. Further, most researched human behaviours are influenced by a very large number of genes and the individual effects of these genes are very small. These include evidence that nearly all researched behaviours are under a significant degree of genetic influence, and that influence tends to increase as individuals develop into adulthood. This led to major advances in model organism research (e.g., knockout mice) and in human studies (e.g., genome-wide association studies), leading to new scientific discoveries.įindings from behavioural genetic research have broadly impacted modern understanding of the role of genetic and environmental influences on behaviour. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, technological advances in molecular genetics made it possible to measure and modify the genome directly. In the latter half of the 20th century, the field saw renewed prominence with research on inheritance of behaviour and mental illness in humans (typically using twin and family studies), as well as research on genetically informative model organisms through selective breeding and crosses. Behavioural genetics was founded as a scientific discipline by Francis Galton in the late 19th century, only to be discredited through association with eugenics movements before and during World War II. While the name "behavioural genetics" connotes a focus on genetic influences, the field broadly investigates the extent to which genetic and environmental factors influence individual differences, and the development of research designs that can remove the confounding of genes and environment. Behavioural genetics, also referred to as behaviour genetics, is a field of scientific research that uses genetic methods to investigate the nature and origins of individual differences in behaviour.
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