The importance of ncRNA for the future of genetic research is that we may have been looking in the wrong place in the genome to find genes responsible for the high heritability of many disorders and dimensions of behaviour in childhood. As mentioned earlier, almost all of the thousands of monogenic disorders involve the 2% of DNA in coding regions (exons) of traditional genes, as suggested by the central dogma of molecular genetics. Although monogenic effects are severe and rare, it was reasonable to assume that more minor variations in these same coding regions would contribute to the heritability of common disorders and quantitative traits. However, this logic may have been wrong: The reason why monogenic disorders are in coding regions may be the reason why genes contributing to common disorders and quantitative traits are not in coding regions. Functional changes in these evolutionarily conserved coding regions of genes often have drastic consequences --the monogenic disorders that we see may in fact be the most benign forms of mutations in these regions, mutations that are at least viable, whereas most
