Digging yields clues
Nature vs. nurture has long been one of the great debates in science — is behavior hard-wired into the brain, or determined by environment? In at least some cases, Harvard researchers are showing, how animals behave is in their genes. As described in a Jan. 16 paper in Nature, a team of researchers led by Hopi Hoekstra, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and molecular and cellular biology, studied two species of mice – oldfield mice and deer mice – and identified four regions in their genome that appear to influence the way they dig burrows. “Given that burrowing is such a complex behavior, it was surprising that it may be controlled by just a few genes,” Hoekstra said. “More importantly, it looks like the genetics are modular, so if we think in terms of how do you ‘build’ a complex trait, it could be that as you start to put these different...