Focus on behavioural genetics

Abstract

Few issues in genetic research attract more interest than how genes influence behaviour. The shades of eugenics, the promise of children chosen (or even engineered) for their behavioural constitution, hang over attempts to identify the genetic basis of mental illness, and particularly intelligence, with their seemingly inevitable appeals for controversy. And, at the same time, there stands one of the most challenging questions facing biology: how does a central nervous system, a brain that we know owes its constitution at least in part to the concerted action of a genome, give rise to behaviour?