Aka Pygmies
The Pith: There has been a long running argument whether Pygmies in Africa are short due to “nurture” or “nature.” It turns out that non-Pygmies with more Pygmy ancestry are shorter and Pygmies with more non-Pygmy ancestry are taller. That points to nature.
In terms of how one conceptualizes the relationship of variation in genes to variation in a trait one can frame it as a spectrum with two extremes. One the one hand you have monogenic traits where the variation is controlled by differences on just one locus. Many recessively expressed diseases fit this patter (e.g., cystic fibrosis). Because you have one gene with only a few variants of note it is easy to capture in one’s mind’s eye the pattern of Mendelian inheritance for these traits in a gestalt fashion. Monogenic traits are highly amenable to a priori logic because their atomic units are so simple and tractable. At the other extreme you have quantitative polygenic traits, where the variation of the trait is controlled by variation on many, many, genes. This may seem a simple …