Molecular Genetics of Complex Behavior: Biological Rhythms in Drosophila

Abstract

It is something of a truism to say that behavioral genetics has been a poor relation within the discipline of genetics, even though it can claim an ancestry that dates back to the time of Galton. Whereas biochemical, molecular, population and developmental genetics have taken great strides forward in the past 20-30 years, behavioral genetics, until relatively recently, has attracted little attention among the biological community. When it has made an impact, as it did in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was for the wrong reasons. The sterile“ genes and IQ” debate, which generated lots of heat but little light during that period (for review, see Hay 1985), left geneticists, who were pursuing more mainstream nonbehavioral problems, shrugging their shoulders and offering their sympathies to their behavioral-genetics colleagues who had obviously got out of their depth.“ The behavioral phenotype is too difficult to work with,” some of my colleagues would (and still do) say.