The bravery required to call out attitudes one finds distasteful is a trait to be admired.
His mother taught him that humility was not a trait to be encouraged.
"It's a valuable trait to be cheerful in the Mormon church," she laughs, cascades of auburn curls moving with her.
The more one has of the trait to be touted (fitness, say), the less costly the signal (feathers), making the display of the signal a reliable proxy for the trait.
And John Adams writes Abigail to suggest that the arrogance shown by the British in seizing a couple of hundred American merchantmen is a trait to be found in his own countrymen.
"It is also a female trait to be able to see that war is not a cold, rational decision, which is what we are made to believe," Ms. Belli continued.
A malaria-free mosquito has been created by scientists using a genetic technology that causes the disease-free trait to be inherited by virtually all its offspring – raising the possibility of eradicating malaria within a single breeding season.
In instances when two parent organisms each carry two mutant genes in a homozygous recessive state, causing the recessive trait to be expressed, the complementation test can determine whether the recessive trait will be expressed in the next generation.
Patience, above all, is a trait to be cultivated "If you've got a person or people in a photo and they're not moving, I move around so that they become part of the picture," Mr. Rettie said.
"It can take 10 to 15 years for a new trait to be worked into a new variety [of grain] so if we're looking ahead at 35 years, that means we can do several generations of testing.
Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard whose forthcoming book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature," argues that humans have become less violent over the millenniums, suggests that the way to think about genetics and crime is to start with human nature and then look at what causes the switch for a particular trait to be flipped on or off.
