Introducing Students to the Genetic Information Age

AS an instructor of college introductory biologyI hope that a little knowledge is not a danger-ous thing (for clichés I prefer the one in which a little goes a long way). I wonder, however, how my former students with only a semester or two of biology behind them react to the increasingly frequent accounts in the popular press of genetic determinants of traits. I am especially apprehensive of how they interpret reports of genetic influences on human behavior, which sometimes attribute genetic versus environmental effects with decimal precision. For most students, their formal lessons in genetics will not go beyond what is received in a general biology course. For pedagogical reasons, instructors start with simplicity. Like Mendel, we turn to traits that are influenced primarily by a single gene, are little affected by interactions with other genes or the