“Genetical perspective on Human Behavior and Group Differences”, with Sasha Gusev, Harvard Medical School, on May 19 (via Teams)

On May 19, Sasha Gusev, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, will give a seminar at the Institut Pasteur entitled "Genetical Perspective on Human Behavior and Group Differences."

The seminar will take place remotely via Teams.

You can join by clicking on this link
 

Read a brief description of the event here:

The partitioning of variance between genes and environment for behavioral traits has been debated for over a century. Over the past decade, molecular genetics – the direct measurements of individual polymorphisms, particularly within families – have provided a new lens through which to estimate the influence of genes. These studies have revealed that the genetics of behavioral and social outcomes such as IQ, educational attainment, and income exhibit fundamentally different properties from conventional phenotypes like height. Behavioral/social traits appear to be much less directly heritable than previously thought; much more sensitive to environmental context and social structure; and often exhibit paradoxical associations with familial effects. In this talk, I will review the recent molecular findings on these complex phenotypes and reconsider decades of prior findings that were largely or entirely misinterpreted due to environmental confounding.