Re: Twin Studies

From: Malcolm (malcolm_at_55bank.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: 08/25/04 

Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 04:41:39 +0000 (UTC)

"Michael Ragland" <ragland37@webtv.net> wrote
>
> Scientific studies performed on pairs of twins.
> These studies can answer many questions in medical genetics. They are
> especially useful for deciding whether a certain condition is genetic,
> environmental, or both. To understand how twin studies work, you must
> know two things:
>
Twin studies are useful. If concordance is less than 100%, then a condition
cannot be solely genetic. For instance the concordance for speaking English
is probably 99.999% or something similar, which shows that there must be a
non-gentic component. The concordance for speaking Icelandic is probably
100% (it's unlikely that there is a pair of identical twins in existence of
which only one speaks Icelandic). This doesn't necessarily mean that
speaking Icelandic is genetically determined, though it might be on the
evidence of the study.

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