heritability
Sign in to savethumb|right|160px|Studies of heritability ask questions such as to what extent do genetic factors influence differences in height between people. This is not the same as asking to what extent do genetic factors influence height in any one person. Heritability is a statistic used in the fields of breeding and genetics that estimates the degree of variation in a phenotypic trait in a population that is due to genetic variation between individuals in that population. The concept of heritability can be expressed in the form of the following question: "What is the proportion of the variation in a g
Article
23 sectionsContents
- Overview
- Definition
- Example
- Assumptions
- Estimating heritability
- Regression/correlation methods of estimation
- Comparison of close relatives
- Parent-offspring regression
- Sibling comparison
- Twin studies
- Analysis of variance methods of estimation
- Basic model
- Intraclass correlations
- The ANOVA
- Model with additive and dominance terms
- Linear mixed models
- Genomic heritability
- Response to selection
- Controversies
- See also
- References
- Further reading
- External links
thumb|right|160px|Studies of heritability ask questions such as to what extent do genetic factors influence differences in height between people. This is not the same as asking to what extent do genetic factors influence height in any one person. Heritability is a statistic used in the fields of breeding and genetics that estimates the degree of variation in a phenotypic trait in a population that is due to genetic variation between individuals in that population. The concept of heritability can be expressed in the form of the following question: "What is the proportion of the variation in a given trait within a population that is not explained by the environment or random chance?"
Other causes of measured variation in a trait are characterized as environmental factors, including observational error. In human studies of heritability these are often apportioned into factors from "shared environment" and "non-shared environment" based on whether they tend to result in persons brought up in the same household being more or less similar to persons who were not.