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Biologically constrained behavioral genetics research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2016

Elizabeth A. D. Hammock
Elizabeth A. D. Hammock*
Affiliation:
Department of Pediatrics, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, 1115 Light Hall, Nashville, TN 37232. liz.hammock@vanderbilt.edu
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Extract

From a biologist's perspective, social behavior includes any behavior that involves at least two actors. By this definition, social behavior can include aggregation in slime molds, the colony structure of the eusocial insects, or the coordinated efforts of humans across vast distances to successfully land on the moon. The diversity of this range of behavior shares one driving force: natural selection. While natural selection acts at the level of phenotype (e.g., morphology, metabolism, behavior) the ultimate unit of natural selection is the gene contained in DNA-the object of inheritance. The relationship between DNA and social behavior is uncovered in the field of sociogenomics, defined as the mechanistic study of genes, gene products, and gene × gene interaction networks supporting emergent social behaviors.

Type
NSF Workshop Report
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , Fall 2011 , pp. 93 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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