Table 3 Summary of the argument of Sect. "Heritability: an unreliable index"
Section | Biological background and main claim against WDP view |
|---|---|
4 Heritability: an unreliable index | Heritability, (h2) is a measure of the genetic relationship between parents and offspring, often defined as a ratio of genetic variance to phenotypic variance Vg/Vp. It is highly modulated by environmental variation |
4.1 Confounders of heritability | Effects of non-additive and developmental factors, as well as shared environments, cannot be fully separated from heritability when predicting the outcome of individual crosses or a series of them |
4.2 High variability, small effect size | As with the small effect sizes attributed to alleles by GWAS, even traits with high heritability could vary in relation to environments. Thus, heritability is not reliable for accurately predicting an individual's phenotypic performance |