PRENATAL DEVELOPMENT

• Natural selection - those individuals of a species that are best adapted survive and reproduce; fuels evolution
• Adaptive behaviors - promotes an organism's survival in the natural habitat
• Evolutionary Psychology - importance of adaptation, reproduction, and "survival of the fittest" in shaping behavior
• Biology allows a broad range of cultural possibilities - Stephen Jay Gould
• Genetic information is all of the information stored in our DNA - deoxyribonucleic acid (Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, Cytosine)
• Gene - sequence of genetic information that contains the building instructions for a specific protein
• A cell nucleus contains a number of strands (Chromosomes - by pairs)
• 22 pairs of chromosomes - Women (X), Men (XY)
• Alleles - different versions of genes
• Behavior genetics - concerned with the influence of heredity and environment on individual differences in human traits and development
• Scarr's heredity-environment correlation - Passive, Evocative, Active (niche-picking)
• Heredity directs the types of environments that children experience, the 3 genotype-environment correlations changes as children develop
• Shared environmental experiences are families' common experiences or intellectual orientation
• Nonshared environment experiences - child's unique experiences that are not shared with other children
• Epigenetic view - the environment can influence gene expression without changing the DNA sequence