Submitted by Chance_Literature193 t3_11i764u in askscience
SerialStateLineXer t1_jb5l8n8 wrote
Reply to comment by Georgie___Best in Understanding Heritability (h^2) Statistic? by Chance_Literature193
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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