by John Traveler

Created on: November 09, 2009   Last Updated: November 16, 2009

Behavioral genetics is a field of study which deals with animal behaviorism as an attribute of genetic inheritance. To what degree are the attributes of human persona and mannerism the result of developmental and environmental influences and to what degree are they inherited from our parents? It is a difficult question to answer.

In the 1940's, researcher Robert Tyson discovered that the offspring of rats that had learned to run a maze seemed to have inherited the ability from their parents. Did this suggest that intelligence could be inherited? A whole lot of neuroscientists were beginning to consider the possibility. Since then the field of genetics has undergone a transformation of revolutionary proportions. Today geneticists are considering the implications of individual genes in human and other animal DNA, and yet the elusive smoking gun that would support any contention that behavioral traits are inherited remains elusive.

The study of identical twins, those who's genes are 100 percent equivalent, has provided the best opportunity to study not only genetic influences on behaviorism, but environmental factors as well. One might presume, that if behavioral patterns are inherited, that this would be true 100 percent of the time, and that identical twins would be behaviorally identical as well. In reality this is not the case. What researchers in the field have determined, is that while genes play a significant roll in establishing a predisposition favoring a given behavioral trait, they do not specifically influence the predominance of the trait in an offspring. Environmental influence seems to be at least a secondary factor.

Since the human genome was sequenced in 2000, the ability to investigate specific genes has opened the door to new fields of genetic research, including a new discipline called epigenetics. This field of study considers both the effect of genes with respect to heredity as well as the effect of environmental influences on genetic metamorphosis. Recently, some vary amazing things have been learned that are going to radically alter perceptions with respect to genetics including behavioral genetics. For instance, genetic mutation has been previously thought of as an aspect of conceptual incipience and that once the union of maternal and paternal progenitor DNA has taken place, the genetic blueprint remains static for the rest of the individuals life. New evidence uncovered by epigeneticists clearly contradicts this notion, suggesting that

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