REFRESHER COURSE ON BEHAVIOR GENETICS: SYNTHESIS AND OUTLOOK

This Refresher Course was originally arranged around two problems: the mechanism of the genie control of behavior, and its evolutionary implications. The first question is the primary reason why behavior genetics is regarded as a discipline of its own, even though, as several of the speakers have emphasized, behavior is not in principle different from morphological phenotypes with regard to its genetic determination. Since we are interested in the phenotype "behavior" in its own right, we find in its genetic analysis a powerful tool to analyze and understand its origin in the history of individual organisms. The second topic is a direct consequence of the first: it is obvious that behavioral characters play a large role in determining the genetic makeup of populations and the fitness of populations in particular environments. Furthermore, we have seen that geneticallydetermined behavioral characters play a large role in the evolutionary changes occurring in populations, and in the process of speciation.