On 18 Mar 2008 at 20:50, FRANTZ, SUE wrote:
>
> I'm surprised that the article mentioned repeats without mentioning
> Huntington's disease.
Speaking of which, there's a new and rather unusual article on the topic:
Ringman, J. (2007). The Huntington disease of Woody Guthrie: another man
done gone. Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, 20, 238-243 (December).
In it, Ringman reviews the career of the great songwriter Woody Guthrie
("This land is our land") who died of HD. Ringman points out that
Guthrie's most productive years were in the period immediately preceding
the onset of HD. He speculates that "subclinical HD may have been an
important driving force behind Woody Guthrie's creativity".
As for Chris's posting of the NY Times article on genetic differences
between MZ twins, it seems to me (if I've got the logic right) that it
carries with it an important conclusion for the use of twin studies in
psychology.
When considering characteristics of MZ twins, under the usual assumption
that they have absolutely identical genetic specification, any
differences between them (in personality, for example) are ascribed to
the effect of the environment.
But now that we know that they can differ both for epigenetic reasons and
for copy number variation, we can no longer make this claim. Some degree
of the variation beween MZ twins formerly attributed to environmental
effects must instead be due to genetic variation. This means that the
genetic contribution for many psychological factors must be greater than
is estimated by conventional means.
Stephen
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