Which traits are innate and which depend on circumstance? #NatGeoExplorer Christopher Schmitt has been contemplating this question since he was young. Schmitt shares, “I grew up as a visibly gay kid in the Midwest [United States], where I was exposed to a lot of bullying in which others speculated, often cruelly, about how I got to be that way…so [I had] a kind of existential panic around whether this hugely important trait was innate and immutable, or environmental and maybe then changeable.” Now, working with vervet monkeys as a primate geneticist, Schmitt studies how genetic factors underlying traits like body fatness can experience changes as a result of the environment, such as diet or drought exposure. For Schmitt, “it’s immensely satisfying to take these existential anxieties from our queer childhoods and reframe them into a strong theoretical grounding for understanding the biological origins of complex traits. Of course, the monkeys are pretty great, too.” 🐒 Read more at https://lnkd.in/e8P5cWF2. Seen here are Schmitt in the field at Cocha Cashu Biological Station in Peru (Photo by Andrew McFarland), and another of his study species, a wild yellow-tailed woolly monkey mother and infant, photographed at his field site in Beirut, Corosha, Peru (Photo by Sofia Weaver). #PrideMonth
Gyobutsuji
1mo
Most informative.
Storyteller and community builder. Empowerment evangelist and leader at GSEA by EO.
1moWhat fascinating work! Curious about how this intersects with latest ideas around epigenetics.