Submitted by Chance_Literature193 t3_11i764u in askscience
Georgie___Best t1_jb4u7v7 wrote
Reply to comment by SerialStateLineXer in Understanding Heritability (h^2) Statistic? by Chance_Literature193
>No, you can't estimate heritability that way, because this can't distinguish between genetic and environmental transmission of traits.
What do you mean by environmental transmission of traits?
Parent-offspring regression is definitely one way to estimate heritability. It has flaws and biases, but no more than estimates derived from twin-studies, which tend to overestimate narrow-sense heritability.
SerialStateLineXer t1_jb5l8n8 wrote
Are you under the impression that heritability of height is defined as the correlation between children's heights and the average of their parents' heights? Obviously you can determine that by calculating said correlation, but that's not what heritability means.
Heritability refers specifically to share of variation in a trait attributable to genetic variation. I suppose it's possible that there's some field other than genetics in which the term is used to refer to the degree to which children are similar to their parents, but the original question specifically referred to the definition used in genetics, and you definitely can't calculate that by comparing children to their parents. If you could, twin studies would never have been invented. That's the exact problem they were invented to solve.
Georgie___Best t1_jb65yb6 wrote
Somewhat surprised that you're familiar with the concept of heritability, but not yet come across regression of offspring on mid-parents as a method to estimate it. For example:
Parent-offspring regression to estimate the heritability of an HIV-1 trait in a realistic setup
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