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Behavioural genetics, also commonly referred to as behaviour genetics, is the field of study that examines the role of genetic and environmental influences on animal (including human) behaviour. Often associated with the "nature versus nurture" debate, behavioural genetics is highly interdisciplinary, involving contributions from biology, neuroscience, genetics, epigenetics, ethology, psychology, and statistics. Behavioural geneticists study the inheritance of behavioural traits. In humans, this information is often gathered through the use of genetic association studies or family studies including the twin study or adoption study. In animal studies, breeding, transgenesis, and gene knockout techniques are common. Psychiatric genetics is a closely related field, in many ways a subfield of behavioural genetics. == History == Sir Francis Galton, a nineteenth-century intellectual, is recognized as one of the first behavioural geneticists. Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, studied the heritability of human ability, focusing on mental characteristics as well as eminence among close relatives in the English upper-class. In 1869, Galton published his results in ''Hereditary Genius''. In his work, Galton "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". Galton is often credited as the pioneer of eugenics. In 1951, Calvin S. Hall in his seminal book chapter on behavioural genetics introduced the term "psychogenetics", which enjoyed some limited popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. However, it eventually disappeared from usage in favour of "behaviour genetics". Behaviour genetics, ''per se'', gained recognition as a research discipline with the publication in 1960 of the textbook ''Behavior Genetics'' by John L. Fuller and William Robert (Bob) Thompson (then Chair of the Department of Psychology at Queen's University, Canada). Nowadays, it is widely accepted that most behaviours in animals and humans are under some degree of genetic influence. Underscoring the role of evolution in behavioural genetics, Theodosius Dobzhansky was elected the first president of the Behavior Genetics Association in 1972; the BGA bestows the Dobzhansky Award on researchers for their outstanding contributions to the field. In the early 1970s, Lee Ehrman, a doctoral student of Dobzhansky, wrote seminal papers describing the relationship between genotype frequency and mating success in ''Drosophila'', lending impetus to the pursuit of genetic studies of behaviour in other animals. Studies on hygienic behaviour in honey bees were also carried out early in the history of the field. The social behaviour of honey bees has also been studied and recent work has focussed on the gene involved in the foraging behaviour of ''Drosophila''; this essentially allowed for deriving a relationship between gene expression and behaviour, where the gene regulating foraging behaviour in ''Drosophila'' also regulated social behaviour in bees. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Behavioural genetics」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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