ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how such dynamic processes may be relevant to understanding the development of expertise and to making sense of heritable variation in behavioral phenotypes more generally. It discusses how such processes may apply to the developmental of expert skill. Given that experience is necessary for the acquisition of expertise and that expertise in a wide range of domains is heritable, the intuition that genetic effects compete with experiential effects is clearly flawed. Genetic material (DNA) contains the code for creating proteins that are critical to the functions of cells and the tissues and organs that they compose. Classical methods in behavioral genetics, such as twin and extended-family studies capitalize on the fact that interindividual differences in DNA sequence variation are not entirely random. Mendel's laws of inheritance dictate that individuals who are more closely related, in the familial sense, are more genetically similar.
