Pros And Cons Of Twin Adoption And Family Studies

The perusal and review of twin, adoption, and family studies allows us to understand how the combination of biology and environment shapes us all. Some aspects of personality are linked to genes and have a biological basis, but it has allows been hard to separate biological basis of behavior from an environmental basis of behavior.
Twin studies are a vastly important tool in dissecting the nature versus nurture argument.
Pros of twin studies are that identical twins otherwise known as monozygotic twins have genotypes that are identical to each other. Therefore, monozygotic twins are the best indicator of whether biology is the main effector of behavior and psychopathology. Not only are the genotypes identical in monozygotic twins, but they …show more content…
Cons of twin studies, although monozygotic twins share the same genome. They often time does not share the same set of active genes, genes that are fully functioning and expressing proteins hence they do not share the same phenotype. This difference in phenotype is biological in nature and it may be due to the fact of the epigenetics in the womb effecting each twin’s final phenotype. Then of course, other environmental aspects could affect the phenotype of the twins. For instance, one twin could catch a virus, which leads to cancer, and further changes there phenotype from their identical twin. These epigenetic differences become acquired over the twin’s lifetime and hence, they are not identical biologically. Epigenetic markers vary widely from one person to another, but identical twins were still considered genetically identical because epigenetics influences only the expression of a gene, the phenotype and not the underlying sequence of the gene …show more content…
There are also ethical issues when dealing with adoption studies because often there is a compare and contrast between the environment for the adoptee and the environment of the biological family. Hence, the biological family may not want to participate or even it have it known that they have a child outside their current family. In addition, adoption is not a random process; children are often placed in similar families as their biological families. Another aspect is that adoption is an unusual event and the population sample is often small. Small populations means less accurate data or information. This small sample size also effects the usefulness of twin studies since the amount of data might be to small to make an accurate