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Remember that heritability is a measure of a population, not an individual. So you're measuring the amount that genes vs environment contributes to a trait with
by anaphor 6y ago
Remember that heritability is a measure of a population, not an individual. So you're measuring the amount that genes vs environment contributes to a trait within that population. It's not an absolute number.
- ravi-delia 6y agoI mean, yeah? It's still fairly strong evidence against there being literally no genetic component to homosexuality, which I definitely saw a lot of in this thread. Unless I misunderstand your comment?
- anaphor 6y agoNot disagreeing with your original point, just adding that if you were controlling for environmental factors (everyone has equivalent environment), then you'd see more contribution to variance in phenotypes from genetics than environment. So for homosexuality, I'd bet the reason genetics don't contribute as much is because of the heterogeneous environmental conditions (just think about where you grow up and what religion you are for example). Edit: a good example of this in action is handedness, because different societies historically have different advantages to using different hands > Second, the samples used to estimate the handedness heritability were from different places, different years or different centuries and were not always representative of the general population. Heritability is not an intrinsic property of a trait: it varies with phenotypic and additive genetic variances and thus can vary across populations and across generations https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-019-0274-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-019-0274-3
- ravi-delia 6y agoAhh got it, thanks for clarifying. That definitely makes sense, and clicks with my intuition that genetics and the environment are sort of both 100% responsible.