Essentials of behaviour genetics / David A. Hay.

  • Hay, David A.
Date:
1985
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Essentials of behaviour genetics / David A. Hay. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    which encode genetic information. Geneticists are using behaviour as a tool in studying gene action, because altered behaviour can some¬ times be a more convenient indicator of genetic changes than either altered anatomy or physiology. Now that the molecular bases of genetics are fairly well understood, some geneticists feel behaviour provides the next challenge, not The problem of gene structure and coding was exciting while it lasted. The story of the past two eventful decades, including my own contributions, has been well told, and need not be repeated here. But molecular genetics, pursued to ever lower levels of organization, inevitably does away with itself: the gap between genetics and biochemistry disappears. More recently, a number of molecular biologists have turned their sights in the opposite direction, i.e. up to higher integrative levels, to explore the relatively distant horizons of development, the nervous system, and behavior. The problem of tracing the emergence of multidimensional behavior from the genes is a challenge that may not become obsolete so soon. (S. Benzer (1971) Journal of the American Medical Association 218, 1015.) and one to which the same methods can be applied In principle, it should be possible to dissect the genetic specification of behaviour much in the same way as was done for biosynthetic pathways in bacteria or for bacteriophage assembly. (S. Brenner (1973) British Medical Bulletin 29, 269.) A subsidiary advantage of neurogenetics is that it introduces into behaviour genetics a greater diversity of organisms, chosen because of unique features making them suitable for particular experiments and not merely because they are readily available, a frequent criticism of psychology in general. Of the more than one million described species of animals, fewer than five per cent possess a backbone and are known as vertebrates; the other 95 per cent compris'e^ the invertebrates. Of the thousands of studies on animal learning published^(n the past decade, only some five per cent utilized invertebrates as subjects. There are hundreds of thousands of species that have never been introduced to a maze or a Skinner box nor watched at length by an ethologist — indeed, whole phyla have been totally neglected. Two of the many possible causes for this scientific bias are easy to identify: (a) man is anthropocentric, and (b) man is lazy. (J. V. McConnell (1966) Annual Review of Physiology 28, 107.) I EcologiÓal and evolutionary influences on behaviour This ajDproach is outlined in Chapters 4 and 5 and is emphasized in one recent text (Ehrman and Parsons 1981). While we normally think of genes influencing behaviour through a sequence of chemical and physical pathways, the questions of ecology and evolution remind us that behaviour can also influence genes or at least the extent to which particular genetic types are represented in particular populations. Genetically determined différences in behavioural responses to en- 6 CHAPTER 1