What in your view is the distinguishing feature of developmental biology with respect to other natural sciences? It is the source of causality, the genome. Developmental biology differs from other sciences, physics, for example, most profoundly because of the organizing role of the primary informational content of the genome. The genomes of animals are the unique products of a billion years of ...

the fact that life styles and personal interests, aggregate within families suggests that shared environment in addition to shared bioligical factors could play a role in determining the phenotypic similarity of idividuals living in the same household. it is a major concern of cardiovascular epidemiologists to know how much of the familial aggregation of blood pressure is attributable to shared...

Human genetics has been haunted by the mystery of "missing heritability" of common traits. Although studies have discovered >1,200 variants associated with common diseases and traits, these variants typically appear to explain only a minority of the heritability. The proportion of heritability explained by a set of variants is the ratio of (i) the heritability due to these variants (numerator),...

The goal of this review article is to provide a conceptual based summary of how heritability estimates for complex traits such as obesity are determined and to explore the future directions of research in the heritability field. The target audience are researchers who use heritability data rather than those conducting heritability studies. The article provides an introduction to key concepts cr...

Fecundity is usually considered as a trait closely connected to fitness and is expected to exhibit substantial nonadditive genetic variation and inbreeding depression. However, two independent experiments, using populations of different geographical origin, indicate that early fecundity in Drosophila melanogaster behaves as a typical additive trait of low heritability. The first experiment invo...