Molecular Genetics and Economics

The question of how traits and behaviors pass from one generation to the next has been the subject of intense interest throughout the history of science. Simple parent-child correlations are open to multiple interpretations, as parents transmit both environment and genome to their children. Until recently, genotyping – or the direct measurement of variation in an individual’s DNA sequence through biological assays – was exorbitantly expensive; distinguishing the roles of genetics and environment was the realm of behavioral genetics, in which samples of twin, adoption, or other pedigree data were analyzed. However with the completion of the Human Genome Project in the early 2000s (Venter et al., 2001; Lander et al., 2001) and the advent of inexpensive, genome—wide scans of variation, it is now increasingly feasible to examine specific genetic variants that predict individual differences directly.