Robert Plomin

Robert J. Plomin (born 1948) is an American psychologist best known for his work in twin studies and behavior genetics. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Biography

Plomin earned a B.A. in psychology from DePaul University in 1970 and a Ph.D. in psychology in 1974 from the University of Texas at Austin under personality psychologist Arnold Buss. He then worked at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. From 1986 until 1994 he worked at Pennsylvania State University, studying elderly twins reared apart and twins reared together to study aging and is currently at the Institute of Psychiatry (King's College London). He has been president of the Behavior Genetics Association, which in 2002 awarded him the Dobzhansky Memorial Award for a Lifetime of Outstanding Scholarship in Behavior Genetics. He was awarded the William James Fellow Award by the Association for Psychological Science in 2004 and the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Society for Intelligence Research. Plomin was ranked among the 100 most eminent psychologists in the history of science.

Plomin

Coordinates: 45°08′16″N 14°10′51″E / 45.137856°N 14.180775°E / 45.137856; 14.180775

Plomin (Italian: Fianona) is a village in the Croatian part of Istria, situated approximately 11 km north of Labin, on an 80 meters high hill. It is a popular destination for tourists traveling through Istria by road.

Originally named Flanona, the settlement was built in Roman times, above the bay bearing the same name. Plomin was abandoned after World War II, due to the bay becoming too muddy and its inhabitants, mostly Italians, emigrating to Italy. However, it has since been repopulated, and is today home to approximately 130 people. The buildings in the town are several hundred years old, built on the ruins of the original Roman houses. The walls date back to the 9th century.

Plomin contains two churches, St George the Elder and St George the Younger. Both contain Christian art. St. George the Elder contains Plomin tablet as a part of the outer wall, an 11th-century religious text written in the Glagolitic alphabet, the oldest known Slavic alphabet.

Behavioural genetics

Behavioural genetics, also commonly referred to as behaviour genetics, is the field of study that examines the role of genetic and environmental influences on animal (including human) behaviour. Often associated with the "nature versus nurture" debate, behavioural genetics is highly interdisciplinary, involving contributions from biology, neuroscience, genetics, epigenetics, ethology, psychology, and statistics. Behavioural geneticists study the inheritance of behavioural traits. In humans, this information is often gathered through the use of genetic association studies or family studies including the twin study or adoption study. In animal studies, breeding, transgenesis, and gene knockout techniques are common. Psychiatric genetics is a closely related field, in many ways a subfield of behavioural genetics.

History

Sir Francis Galton, a nineteenth-century intellectual, is recognized as one of the first behavioural geneticists. Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, studied the heritability of human ability, focusing on mental characteristics as well as eminence among close relatives in the English upper-class. In 1869, Galton published his results in Hereditary Genius. In his work, Galton "introduced multivariate analysis and paved the way towards modern Bayesian statistics" that are used throughout the sciences—launching what has been dubbed the "Statistical Enlightenment". Galton is often credited as the pioneer of eugenics.

Robert

The name Robert is a Germanic given name, from Proto-Germanic *χrōþi- "fame" and *berχta- "bright". Compare Old Dutch Robrecht and Old High German Hrodebert (a compound of hruod "fame, glory" and berht "bright"). It is also in use as a surname.

After becoming widely used in Continental Europe it entered England in its Old French form Robert, where an Old English cognate form (Hrēodbēorht, Hrodberht, Hrēodbēorð, Hrœdbœrð, Hrœdberð) had existed before the Norman Conquest. The feminine version is Roberta. The Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish form is Roberto.

Similar to the name, Richard, "Robert" is also a common name in many Germanic languages, including English, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic. It can be used as a French, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian name as well.

Variations

Trivia

Robert, and also the name Joseph, were in the top 10 most given boys' names in the US for 47 years, from 1925 to 1972.

In Italy during the Second World War, the form of the name, Roberto, briefly acquired a new meaning derived from, and referring to the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis.

Genetics

Genetics is the study of genes, heredity, and genetic variation in living organisms. It is generally considered a field of biology, but it intersects frequently with many of the life sciences and is strongly linked with the study of information systems.

The father of genetics is Gregor Mendel, a late 19th-century scientist and Augustinian friar. Mendel studied 'trait inheritance', patterns in the way traits were handed down from parents to offspring. He observed that organisms (pea plants) inherit traits by way of discrete "units of inheritance". This term, still used today, is a somewhat ambiguous definition of what is referred to as a gene.

Trait inheritance and molecular inheritance mechanisms of genes are still a primary principle of genetics in the 21st century, but modern genetics has expanded beyond inheritance to studying the function and behavior of genes. Gene structure and function, variation, and distribution are studied within the context of the cell, the organism (e.g. dominance) and within the context of a population. Genetics has given rise to a number of sub-fields including epigenetics and population genetics. Organisms studied within the broad field span the domain of life, including bacteria, plants, animals, and humans.