Abstract
Two markedly different concepts of heritability co-exist in the social and life sciences. Behavioral genetics has popularized a highly technical, quantitative concept: heritability as the proportion of genetic variance relative to the total phenotypic variance of a trait in a population. At the same time, a more common biological notion simply refers to the transmission of phenotypic traits across generations via the transmission of genes. It is argued here that the behavioral-genetic concept is of little use overall, while the common biological concept is overly narrow and implies a false view of the significance of genes in development. By appropriately expanding heritability into a general causal concept based on its role in evolution, we will arrive at a new view of development, heritability, and evolution that recognizes the importance of non-genetic inheritance and the causal parity of all determinants of phenotypic traits.
Highlights
Behavioral genetics shares with many other scientific disciplines the goal of learning about the various factors that shape human beings and about what such knowledge implies for the possibility of positive change
The problems noted by critics are diverse: they range from statistical assumptions made in estimating heritability, the meaning of those estimates and their relationship to the causes of human traits, to the conceptual distinction between nature and nurture underlying behavioral genetics’ core methodology
The way out leads from recognizing the relationship of heritability in the behavioral genetic sense to its common meaning in biology and to generalizing this biological notion into a principled concept of heritability based on its causal role in evolution
Summary
2. Pierrick Bourrat , Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. Any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article. Author roles: Gamma A: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing – Review & Editing; Liebrenz M: Project Administration, Supervision, Writing – Review & Editing. Grant information: The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work. How to cite this article: Gamma A and Liebrenz M.
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