Thread by @rasmansa

Heritability is one of the more misunderstood and misused terms in referring to human traits.

It's also a really strange concept in a modern sense, but this paper is a great explainer.

First, heritability is a claim about a specific group in a specific environment. It tells you nothing about any individual in the group. Add/remove people from the group or change the environment and the statistic would change.

Height is probably one of the better understood complex human traits from a genetics standpoint, and serves as a good example for explaining how heritability is often misunderstood.

The whole nature vs nurture discussion operates on the mistaken idea that the two things are separate, or that nurture simply acts on one's nature (I.e genes determine your potential and environment determines how it ends up)

We don't just inherit genes from our parents, we inherit developmental resources. Those resources interact with other conditions to provide us with our traits.

I've seen people tell me a trait is 75% genetic at the individual level because it has high heritability. This is wrong.

It's important to note that whenever you see heritability estimates, that they tell you nothing about how genetic a trait is for an individual.

As always, I'm not a geneticist. I'm a lay person who just likes to spend a beautiful Sunday morning reading genetics papers and sharing what I learn from them with my Twitter friends.

A lot of great genetics folks around here though.

The paper is well worth a read can can be found here.

sci-hub.tw/https://doi.or…

Thanks to @Simon_Whitten for pointing it out.