Image credit: Assumption-Free Estimation of Heritability from Genome-Wide Identity-by-Descent Sharing between Full Siblings
I really love the paper Assumption-Free Estimation of Heritability from Genome-Wide Identity-by-Descent Sharing between Full Siblings. I first read it about six years ago. The result is rather straightforward, but the problem is empirically a moderately deep one. Modern analytic genetics as the fusion between Mendelism and biometrics began with R. A. Fisher’s The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance in 1918. But note, that paper assumed particular relatedness between relatives. As highlighted in the above paper the expected values for most categories of relatedness always had a variance component which was unaccounted for, and so reduced the power of the methodology to ascertain the extent of heritability. The relatedness you can expect between any two siblings is ~0.50, and that is also the average across all siblings. But the reality is that in most cases two given siblings will not share half their genes identical by descent.
Before the genomic era the precise assessment of relatedness in a given case was laborious, if at all feasible. But not so today. Because modern …