Heritability
Statistic estimating genetic contribution to trait variation in a population.
Heritability is a statistic that estimates the proportion of phenotypic variation in a population due to genetic differences among individuals.[1] It is estimated by comparing phenotypic variation among related individuals, examining genotype-phenotype associations, or modeling summary data from genome-wide association studies.[2] The technical definition of heritability differs from its common folk definition, often causing confusion.[3]
Quick Facts
- Field
- Breeding and genetics
- Known for
- Estimating the proportion of phenotypic variation due to genetic variation
- Key concept
- Broad-sense heritability (H²) and narrow-sense heritability (h²)
- Application
- Selective breeding
- behavior genetics
- twin studies
- GWAS
- Related concepts
- Quantitative genetics
- selective breeding
- behavior genetics
- twin studies
Facts from the source article.
Key facts and history
For example, a heritability of 0.6 for personality traits does not mean 60% of an individual's personality is inherited from parents.[4] Heritability cannot account for factors that are invariant in a population, whether absent or omnipresent.[5] The proportion of phenotypic variability that can be ascribed to genetic differences among individuals is what heritability quantifies, but this does not indicate the genetic basis for any single person's phenotype.[4] Even when no genetic alteration occurs, heritability may shift if, for example, the amount of variation contributed by the environment rises or falls.[4]
A trait with high heritability can still be strongly affected by environmental factors.[4] When estimating heritability for human traits, researchers commonly operate under the "assumption of additivity," which presumes no epistasis is present.[6] Studies of adolescent intelligence and academic achievement in behavior genetics often violate the additivity assumption, according to some empirical findings.[6]
What the research sources say
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry notes that the phenotypic variance equation includes a covariance term between genotype and environment.[7][8] The broad-sense heritability is defined as the genetic variance divided by the phenotypic variance.[7][8] In a controlled experimental setting, the covariance between genotype and environment can be set to zero.[7][8]
References
- Wikipedia, "Heritability" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Wray, "Estimating Trait Heritability", Nature Education, 2008, p. 29; Gazzaniga, "Psychological science", February 2015 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Heritability" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "GCTA: a tool for genome-wide complex trait analysis", American Journal of Human Genetics, January 2011, p. 76–82; "Concepts, estimation and interpretation of SNP-based heritability", Nature Genetics, August 2017, p. 1304–1310; "High-definition likelihood inference of genetic correlations across human complex traits", Nature Genetics, June 2020, p. 859–864 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Heritability" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Coming to terms with heritability", Genetica, June 1997, p. 89–96; Wahlsten, "The intelligence of heritability.", Canadian Psychology, 1994, p. 244–260 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Heritability" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Parenting and its effects on children: on reading and misreading behavior genetics", Annual Review of Psychology, February 2000, p. 1–27; "Heritability in the genomics era--concepts and misconceptions", Nature Reviews. Genetics, April 2008, p. 255–66; "The paradox of intelligence: Heritability and malleability coexist in hidden gene-environment interplay", Psychological Bulletin, January 2018, p. 26–47; "How heritability misleads about race", Cognition, August 1995, p. 99–128 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Heritability" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Turkheimer, "Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean", Current Directions in Psychological Science, October 2000, p. 160–164 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Heritability" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "The mystery of missing heritability: Genetic interactions create phantom heritability", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, January 2012, p. 1193–8; "Nurture net of nature: Re-evaluating the role of shared environments in academic achievement and verbal intelligence", Social Science Research, July 2015, p. 422–39 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Stephen Downes and Lucas Matthews, "Heritability", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. facts only, no text reused. plato.stanford.edu
- Wikipedia, "Heritability" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Stephen Downes and Lucas Matthews, "Heritability", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Heritability (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.
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