Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe the different types of variation in a populationExplain why only heritable variation can be acted upon by natural selectionDescribe genetic drift and the bottleneck effectExplain how each evolutionary force can influence the allele frequencies of a population

Why has it been easier to develop a vaccine to eliminate polio than to control influenza or AIDS? Has there been natural selection for a ’language gene’? Why are there no animals with wheels? When does ‘maximizing fitness’ lead to evolutionary extinction? How are sex and parasites related? Why don’t snakes eat grass? Why don’t we have eyes in the back of our heads? How does modern genomics illustrate and challenge the field?
This course analyzes evolution from a computational, modeling, and engineering perspective. The course has extensive hands-on laboratory exercises in model-building and analyzing evolutionary data.

It’s not nature versus nurture—it’s both! In this episode of Crash Course Biology, we’ll explore how complex interactions between genes and the environment shape all sorts of traits, from human skin color to honeybees’ “royal jelly.”

Chapters:
Nature vs. Nurture
Polygenic Traits
Complex Traits
Epigenetics & Dr. Folami Ideraabdullah
Heritability
Phenotypic Plasticity
Review & Credits
Credits

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The gilthead sea bream is one of the most important fish farmed in the Mediterranean. Selecting for economically valuable genetic traits has helped improve bream farming efficiency. But little is known about the role played by intestinal microbes in selective breeding practices. To find out, researchers examined how genetic selection for different growth rates and diet affect intestinal bacteria in the gilthead sea bream. Bream were divided into three groups according to genetically selected growth rate: slow, intermediate, and fast, and were fed a plant-based diet, a sustainable alternative for the normally carnivorous gilthead sea bream. The plant-based diet significantly changed the microbial makeup of the slow- and intermediate-growth groups, with a much weaker effect observed for the fast-growth group. And when exposed to an intestinal parasite common to the gilthead sea bream, the fast-growth group showed significantly lower parasite intensity and abundance than the slow-growth group..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Growing evidence suggests a link between the gut microbiome and physiological processes, including the immune response and neurological function. But the connection between the gut microbiome and complex diseases remains largely unexplored. A new study suggests that, at least among East Asian populations, distinct microbiome features could give rise to certain diseases. Researchers performed a microbiome genome-wide association study using samples from 1,475 Chinese participants. Their goal was to identify genetic variants among the participants associated with the gut microbiome. According to their findings, certain bacteria could be linked to the risk of certain diseases. For example, developing an irregular heartbeat is associated with an increased abundance of Burkholderiales and Alcaligenaceae, and decreased abundance of Lachnobacterium, Bacteroides coprophilus and Barnesiellaceae. And microbiome features could be clustered by disease, including different cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, and hepatitis..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This website provides a resource for the heritability of all human traits that have been investigated with the classical twin design. The traits have been classified into 28 broad trait domains, as well as according to the standard classification schemes of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) or the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10). Currently the database includes information from 2748 papers, published between 1958 and 2012, reporting on 17804 traits on a total of 14,558,903 twin pairs. Have Fun!

People have a deep intuition about what has been called the “nature–nurture question.” Some aspects of our behavior feel as though they originate in our genetic makeup, while others feel like the result of our upbringing or our own hard work. The scientific field of behavior genetics attempts to study these differences empirically, either by examining similarities among family members with different degrees of genetic relatedness, or, more recently, by studying differences in the DNA of people with different behavioral traits. The scientific methods that have been developed are ingenious, but often inconclusive. Many of the difficulties encountered in the empirical science of behavior genetics turn out to be conceptual, and our intuitions about nature and nurture get more complicated the harder we think about them. In the end, it is an oversimplification to ask how “genetic” some particular behavior is. Genes and environments always combine to produce behavior, and the real science is in the discovery of how they combine for a given behavior.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"At birth, the mouth is sterile and relatively germ-free. It's only later that bacteria colonize the mouths of children. But little is understood about how and why certain bacteria triumph over others some of which are responsible for spreading diseases such as dental caries and periodontal disease. It’s a question of what matters more: genetics or environment, nature or nurture? To find out researchers compared the mouths of two groups of people. Parents and their biological children and parents and their adopted children. This design helped researchers separate genetic factors from environmental ones affecting the oral microbiota. Results showed no differences in how closely oral bacterial profiles matched between adoptive versus biological mother-child pairs. In fact, the oral microbiomes of all children more closely resembled those of their own mothers than those of unrelated women suggesting that contact and shared environment play a bigger role than genetics alone..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Psychology is designed to meet scope and sequence requirements for the single-semester introduction to psychology course. The book offers a comprehensive treatment of core concepts, grounded in both classic studies and current and emerging research. The text also includes coverage of the DSM-5 in examinations of psychological disorders. Psychology incorporates discussions that reflect the diversity within the discipline, as well as the diversity of cultures and communities across the globe.Senior Contributing AuthorsRose M. Spielman, Formerly of Quinnipiac UniversityContributing AuthorsKathryn Dumper, Bainbridge State CollegeWilliam Jenkins, Mercer UniversityArlene Lacombe, Saint Joseph's UniversityMarilyn Lovett, Livingstone CollegeMarion Perlmutter, University of Michigan

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Discuss the findings of the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart as they relate to personality and geneticsDiscuss temperament and describe the three infant temperaments identified by Thomas and ChessDiscuss the evolutionary perspective on personality development

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Discuss supernatural perspectives on the origin of psychological disorders, in their historical contextDescribe modern biological and psychological perspectives on the origin of psychological disordersIdentify which disorders generally show the highest degree of heritabilityDescribe the diathesis-stress model and its importance to the study of psychopathology