Week4+-+Genetics+opening

Welcome to Week 4 - Nature versus Nurtur: How can one tell?

In class we will continue to explore the principles of inheritance, first established out by Gergor Mendel. In parallel, we are gearing our honors course towards a group project in human genetics.

The objectives of this week's reading and postings are as follows: A. How can we tell, experimentally, if a certain phenotype is inherited and to what degree it depends on environmental factors? B. What CAN be considered an //environmental factor//? Does it have to be in the surrounding of the organism? Or can it be within its body? C. Some observations can be explained in multiple ways, often complicating the life of the researchers. So, how does one design an experiment that will attempt to rule out as many explanations as possible, leaving fewer and fewer explanations to consider? Let's see how it works in a study of autism. D. Some new vocabulary.

The article is called: "Another clue in the mystery of autism". You can find the article in the following link: [] (no password needed; I recommend to click on 'print' and either pring the article as is, or first copy it onto a Word document, then print).)

(Look it up if you need to. Your answer should be no longer than two sentences long!)
 * Question1: What is Autism Spectrum Disorder? Why the word 'spectrum'?**


 * Question 2**: Read the article carefully. List the possible causes for autism that the researchers heard about or thought about, //before// they conducted their study. Include explanation that the researchers thought are incorrect.


 * Question 3:** It seems that Autism can be affected by both inherited genes ('nature') and various environmental factors ("Nurture"), many of which the parents of the child cannot control. Which of the two (nature or nurture) was stronger in this article? How did they prove it is not the other factor?


 * Question 4:** If you had a chance - what would you ask the writers or the scientists in thie aticle? For example, you can ask for more information on how they conducted their study; you can criticise their methods, if you think the results are ot convincing; you can ask them to clarify some keywords; Ask them about their expectations before the resreach had begun..

PLEASE POST YOUR ANSWERS DIRECTLY onto the discussion board. Title your responses as ""Week4, Question 1" or 2 or 3... Thsi time, you will find no prompt from me, so I can use the 'reply' to reply to your posts on the wiki. I hope this will work out without too much trouble.

DUE: Sunday February 4th 9:00 pm

//Project will begin in parallel//..