On several occasions I’ve gotten into discussions with geneticists about the possibility of reconstructing someone’s facial structure by genes alone. Combined with advances in pigmentation prediction by genetics, this could put the sketch artist out of business! But all that begs the question: how heritable are facial features anyhow? Impressionistically we know that feature are broadly heritable. This isn’t a tenuous supposition, you see the resemblance over and over across families. All that being said, what are the specific quantitative heritability estimates? How do they relate to other traits we’re interested in? This review from the early 1990s seems to have what I’m looking for, The Role of Genetics in Craniofacial Morphology and Growth. Below is a table which shows averaged heritabilities for a range of facial quantitative traits from a large number of studies:
h2 is the narrow-sense heritability. Also, in care you are curious cephalometry seems to be utilizing imaging of some sort. Anthropmetry refers to the more conventional measuring techniques (get out the calipers!). These results suggest that facial features are typically more heritable than behavioral traits (usually < 0.50), but less heritable than …