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HUMAN GENETICS QUESTION!! ( Please do it in excel as asked!) Thanks! Usually, to

ID: 68935 • Letter: H

Question

HUMAN GENETICS QUESTION!! (Please do it in excel as asked!) Thanks!

Usually, to get significant results in a linkage analysis, one needs a larger sample size than a single family (even if the family is large). You want to expand on this study, so you recruit four more families (Families B, C, D, and E) in which the disease is present. The pedigrees are: For each of the pedigrees, calculate and plot the Z scores for every value of ft from 0.01 to 0.5 (0.01, 0.02. 0.03, 0.04, ... 0.48, 0.49, 0.50). Of course, you will not want to use a calculator, you will want to use Excel. The great thing about Z scores is that they are additive across families, so you should also make a plot of the sum across families for all of these values of 0. I would like you to make these plots in Excel (and please feel free to format them to look pretty), and then put them in to a Word document where you should add a brief description of the plots, and also briefly answer the following questions: What are your interpretations of these results? If any family appears different than the rest, why do you think that might be? What do

Explanation / Answer

Summary One of the most important findings that has emerged from human behavioral genetics involves the environment rather than heredity, providing the best available evidence for the importance of environmental influences on personality, psychopathology, and cognition. The research also converges on the remarkable conclusion that these environmental influences make two children in the same family as different from one another as are pairs of children selected randomly from the population.

The theme of the target article is that environmental differences between children in the same family (called “nonshared environment”) represent the major source of environmental variance for personality, psychopathology, and cognitive abilities. One example of the evidence that supports this conclusion involves correlations for pairs of adopted children reared in the same family from early in life. Because these children share family environment but not heredity, their correlation directly estimates the importance of shared family environment. For most psychological characteristics, correlations for adoptive “siblings” hover near zero, which implies that the relevant environmental influences are not shared by children in the same family. Although it has been thought that cognitive abilities represent an exception to this rule, recent data suggest that environmental variance that affects IQ is also of the nonshared variety after adolescence.