For an AP Psych class I am doing a presentation on the relationship for Selective Breeding, Dominant and Recessive Traits and how these factors are related to Psychology. I need to know exactly what they are and how they are related. Thanks!

-- Lauren Finn (honeycjf@aol.com), October 02, 2001

Answers

A good dictionary of psychology or biology would probably do a better job than I will, but very briefly, selective breeding is the act of mating animals together that have desirable traits so that they produce offspring with those traits. A dominant trait is expressed in the offspring if it has received the gene for it from *either* parent. A recessive trait is expressed in the offspring only if it has received the gene for it from *both* parents (see Gregor Mendel, and genetic "magic squares"). Its relation to psychology comes primarily in the form of eugenics, a movement that was popular esp. in the early part of the 20th century to encourage "desirable" (i.e., rich, smart, successful) people to marry and have children and/or discourage or even prevent "undesirable" people from doing so. The term was first coined by Francis Galton in the late 19th century.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), October 03, 2001.