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Race is thus partly a surrogate for environmental factors such as differences in socioeconomic status that are known to affect health. It is also an imperfect surrogate for ancestral geographic regions and differences in gene frequencies between different ancestral populations and thus differences in genes that can affect health.
The study of human genetic variation has evolutionary significance and medical applications. It can help scientists reconstruct and understand patterns of past human migration. In medicine, study of human genetic variation may be important because some disease-causing alleles occur more often in certain population groups.
Heredity, also called inheritance or biological inheritance, is the passing on of traits from parents to their offspring; either through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction, the offspring cells or organisms acquire the genetic information of their parents.
Human variability, or human variation, is the range of possible values for any characteristic, physical or mental, of human beings. Frequently debated areas of variability include cognitive ability , personality , physical appearance ( body shape , skin color , etc.) and immunology .
Genetic epidemiology is the study of the role of genetic factors in determining health and disease in families and in populations, and the interplay of such genetic factors with environmental factors. Genetic epidemiology seeks to derive a statistical and quantitative analysis of how genetics work in large groups.
This allows a test of the genetic overlap between different phenotypes: for instance hair color and eye color. Environment and genetics may also interact, and heritability analyses can test for and examine these interactions (GxE models). A prerequisite for heritability analyses is that there is some population variation to account for.
Human genetics is the study of inheritance as it occurs in human beings. Human genetics encompasses a variety of overlapping fields including: classical genetics , cytogenetics , molecular genetics , biochemical genetics , genomics , population genetics , developmental genetics , clinical genetics , and genetic counseling .
Investigators in animal behaviour genetics can carefully control for environmental factors and can experimentally manipulate genetic variants, allowing for a degree of causal inference that is not available in studies on human behavioural genetics. [15] In animal research selection experiments have often been employed.