Animal Behavior Genetic
Your short essay(10%) will be on one of the following topics.
Please follow the instruction carefully!
My choice would be Genetic of Homosexuality, you can choose between human studies with twins or laboratory animal studies.
Topic 1. The genetics of homosexuality
This is a highly contentious issue but please remember, you will need to focus on science and scientific evidence. There are two different areas of research you may want to consider here: a, human studies with twins; and b) laboratory animal studies.
Topic 2. Transgenic (or knock out) mouse models of Alzheimer??s Disease.
When you write your paper, please keep in mind that the scientific study you selected must have a strong genetic component. You may discuss other things also, like neurobiological questions, but the main focus should be behaviour and genetics.
You may base your essay on one or more papers you find. But the target paper(s) must have been published in a peer reviewed scientific journal. Non-peer reviewed website information is unreliable, so please do not rely on any info from such sources. Perhaps the best source of peer reviewed papers is Pubmed (also known as Medline), a large public scientific literature database and search engine maintained by the US National Institute of Health. You will have access to most published papers listed in this data base through our (UTM) library on-line.
What I expect from you is a critical evaluation of the study or studies you chose. Please imagine you are asked to referee a publication and provide feedback to the editor of a peer reviewed journal so that he/she could decide whether the submitted paper is worthy of publication or not. So, please be critical, but stay objective. Use your own words and ideas when evaluating a paper. Do not be afraid of questioning things.
Perhaps the best would be if you could structure your paper the following way.
1, provide a brief summary of the study,
2, highlight its most interesting findings and/or conclusions; 3, discuss what you agree or disagree with, praise and criticize aspects of the study, and
4, conclude how this study may have helped us understand the studied problem or question better and how it contributed to our knowledge.
You may cite other papers to support your points, but if you do, please make sure you cite these papers in a way required in peer reviewed publications (e.g. provide bibliographic details). Most papers follow the APA style and formatting instructions. You may choose this format or another format (for example the format, citation and reference style of the target paper you chose), but whatever format you choose be consistent.
Your essay must be 4 pages long, double spaced, and use 12 pt font characters.
Your TA will evaluate your essay based upon the following criteria:
Content, i.e. how well you summarized and understood the main findings of the paper you chose to review, how interesting and original the points you raise and how valid your comments are from a scientific perspective.
Style, grammar and format. Are your sentences easy to understand? Is the structure of your essay logical? Are there grammatical errors or spelling mistakes?