So why do developmental scientists need to understand concepts such as recombination and LD? Most developmental scientists will never conduct a linkage study and may never run a genome-wide association studies (GWAS; though the latter is becoming increasingly unlikely due to falling genotype costs, as detailed further in section “What Should We Be Doing?”). Not every scientist interested in genetic influence needs to be engaged in gene finding studies. However, there are still tremendous contributions that developmental scientists can make to understanding how genetic influences impact behavior. Most gene identification efforts continue to focus on adult psychiatric diagnoses, for many justifiable reasons, such as diagnostic reliability across the many sites necessary to obtain large enough numbers of individuals to have power to identify genes of small effect. But because the focus of gene identification is often with a static, distal outcome, this means that developmental scientists have much to offer in terms of further characterizing the risk associated with identified genes, studying how genetic risk unfolds across development, the mediating processes by which risk unfolds, and what environments moderate risk
