Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with heated debate around whether these technologies should be considered eugenics or not.
Nature versus nurture is a long-standing debate in biology and society about the relative influence on human beings of their genetic inheritance (nature) and the environmental conditions of their development (nurture). The alliterative expression "nature and nurture" in English has been in use since at least the Elizabethan period and goes back to medieval French. The complementary combination of the two concepts is an ancient concept. Nature is what people think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors. Nurture is generally taken as the influence of external factors after conception e.g. the product of exposure, experience and learning on an individual.
Biological determinism, also known as genetic determinism, is the belief that human behaviour is directly controlled by an individual's genes or some component of their physiology, generally at the expense of the role of the environment, whether in embryonic development or in learning. Genetic reductionism is a similar concept, but it is distinct from genetic determinism in that the former refers to the level of understanding, while the latter refers to the supposedly causal role of genes. Biological determinism has been associated with movements in science and society including eugenics, scientific racism, and the debates around the heritability of IQ, the basis of sexual orientation, and sociobiology.
A population bottleneck or genetic bottleneck is a sharp reduction in the size of a population due to environmental events such as famines, earthquakes, floods, fires, disease, and droughts; or human activities such as genocide, speciocide, widespread violence or intentional culling. Such events can reduce the variation in the gene pool of a population; thereafter, a smaller population, with a smaller genetic diversity, remains to pass on genes to future generations of offspring. Genetic diversity remains lower, increasing only when gene flow from another population occurs or very slowly increasing with time as random mutations occur. This results in a reduction in the robustness of the population and in its ability to adapt to and survive selecting environmental changes, such as climate change or a shift in available resources. Alternatively, if survivors of the bottleneck are the individuals with the greatest genetic fitness, the frequency of the fitter genes within the gene pool is increased, while the pool itself is reduced.
Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and among populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology. Studies in this branch of biology examine such phenomena as adaptation, speciation, and population structure.
Human genetic enhancement or human genetic engineering refers to human enhancement by means of a genetic modification. This could be done in order to cure diseases, prevent the possibility of getting a particular disease, to improve athlete performance in sporting events, or to change physical appearance, metabolism, and even improve physical capabilities and mental faculties such as memory and intelligence. These genetic enhancements may or may not be done in such a way that the change is heritable.
Researchers have investigated the relationship between race and genetics as part of efforts to understand how biology may or may not contribute to human racial categorization. Today, the consensus among scientists is that race is a social construct, and that using it as a proxy for genetic differences among populations is misleading.
Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature is a 1984 book by the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, the neurobiologist Steven Rose, and the psychologist Leon Kamin, in which the authors criticize sociobiology and genetic determinism and advocate a socialist society. Its themes include the relationship between biology and society, the nature versus nurture debate, and the intersection of science and ideology.
Canalisation is a measure of the ability of a population to produce the same phenotype regardless of variability of its environment or genotype. It is a form of evolutionary robustness. The term was coined in 1942 by C. H. Waddington to capture the fact that "developmental reactions, as they occur in organisms submitted to natural selection...are adjusted so as to bring about one definite end-result regardless of minor variations in conditions during the course of the reaction". He used this word rather than robustness to consider that biological systems are not robust in quite the same way as, for example, engineered systems.
Human genetic variation is the genetic differences in and among populations. There may be multiple variants of any given gene in the human population (alleles), a situation called polymorphism.
H. Allen Orr is the Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester.
Alpha-actinin-3, also known as alpha-actinin skeletal muscle isoform 3 or F-actin cross-linking protein, is a protein that in humans is encoded by the ACTN3 gene located on chromosome 11. All people have two copies (alleles) of this gene.
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. 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 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. In the latter half of the 20th century, the field saw renewed prominence with research on inheritance of behaviour and mental illness in humans, as well as research on genetically informative model organisms through selective breeding and crosses. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, technological advances in molecular genetics made it possible to measure and modify the genome directly. This led to major advances in model organism research and in human studies, leading to new scientific discoveries.
Issues related to race and sports have been examined by scholars for a long time. Among these issues are racial discrimination in sports as well as the observation that there are overrepresentations and underrepresentations of different races in different sports.
David Epstein is an American journalist. He is the author of two books, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (2019) and The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (2013). Both books were New York Times best sellers.
Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom is a 2005 book by the molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll. It presents a summary of the emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology and the role of toolkit genes. It has won numerous awards for science communication.
G is for Genes: The Impact of Genetics on Education and Achievement is a 2013 book by Robert Plomin, Professor of Behavioral Genetics at the King's College London and Kathryn Ashbury, lecturer in the Centre for Psychology and Education at the University of York. The book summarizes findings of behavioural genetics that are relevant to education and offers policy recommendations. It is written for a wide audience including parents, educators and policy makers.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to evolution:
The Dependent Gene: The Fallacy of "Nature vs. Nurture" is a book by developmental psychologist David S. Moore, originally published in 2002 by Times Books and Henry Holt & Company. The book is highly critical of genetic determinism and the nature-nurture debate, emphasizing that gene action is highly dependent on social and biological factors in the organism's environment. In doing so, it draws on developmental systems theory to present an interactionist approach to the science of genetics. Among the examples Moore cites in the book is that of phenylketonuria (PKU), which is caused by a mutation in a single gene, but can easily be treated through dietary intervention. He argues that PKU, like all traits, is both genetic and environmental in origin. He also critiques the fundamental concept of a discrete "gene", arguing that the function-based boundaries that are claimed to separate genes from one another have changed over time.
Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are is a book by behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin, first published in 2018 by the MIT Press and Allen Lane. The book argues that genetic factors, and specifically variations in individuals' DNA, have a large effect on human psychological traits, accounting for approximately half of all variation in such traits. The book also claims that genes play a more important role in people's personalities than does the environment. In Blueprint, Plomin argues that environmental effects on human psychological differences, although they exist, are "...mostly random – unsystematic and unstable – which means that we cannot do much about them."
