I don’t need to read the linked-to article, as I’ve read other articles using the term “heritability”.
Wikipedia says: “In genetics, Heritability is the proportion of phenotypic variation in a population that is attributable to genetic variation among individuals.” It defines it as
heritability^2 = variance due to genes / variance in the population
That’s a partly-valid analogy, because things other than genetic control can cause high heritability measurements. But I don’t think it’s a strong analogy. You can’t say, “Well, I might have the interpretation in the completely wrong direction here; the phenotypes might be controlling the genes.”
Heritability is unary. Correlation is binary (I’m talking about arity, not domain). You shouldn’t “wrong direction” on a unary relation, but I guess that’s just another reason I shouldn’t have put that in the form of an analogy. I see that you’re taking “heritability(trait) X” as “causes(gene-variance,trait-variance) X”. That’s definitely not what I intended.
I certainly wasn’t trying to convince anyone of “heritability is nonsense!”. According to Wikipedia, it seems that narrow-sense heritability, with gene-environment correlation removed, would be a direct indication of “genetic variation causes phenotypic variation” (within a framework of simple linear combination of each gene, and environment). I don’t know how to tell if someone has actually obtained this number properly, though.
I don’t need to read the linked-to article, as I’ve read other articles using the term “heritability”.
Wikipedia says: “In genetics, Heritability is the proportion of phenotypic variation in a population that is attributable to genetic variation among individuals.” It defines it as
heritability^2 = variance due to genes / variance in the population
heritability : genetic control :: correlation : causation
That’s a partly-valid analogy, because things other than genetic control can cause high heritability measurements. But I don’t think it’s a strong analogy. You can’t say, “Well, I might have the interpretation in the completely wrong direction here; the phenotypes might be controlling the genes.”
Heritability is unary. Correlation is binary (I’m talking about arity, not domain). You shouldn’t “wrong direction” on a unary relation, but I guess that’s just another reason I shouldn’t have put that in the form of an analogy. I see that you’re taking “heritability(trait) X” as “causes(gene-variance,trait-variance) X”. That’s definitely not what I intended.
I certainly wasn’t trying to convince anyone of “heritability is nonsense!”. According to Wikipedia, it seems that narrow-sense heritability, with gene-environment correlation removed, would be a direct indication of “genetic variation causes phenotypic variation” (within a framework of simple linear combination of each gene, and environment). I don’t know how to tell if someone has actually obtained this number properly, though.