According to the reader survey 88 percent said they understood what heritability was. But only 34 percent understood the concept of additive genetic variance. For the purposes of this weblog it highlights that most people don’t understand heritability, but rather heritability. The former is the technical definition of heritability which I use on this weblog, the latter is heritability in the colloquial sense of a synonym for inheritance, biological and cultural. Almost everyone who understands the technical definition of heritability will know what heritability in the ‘narrow sense’ is, often just informally termed heritability itself. It is the proportion of phenotype variability that can be attributed to additive genetic variation. Those who understand additive genetic variance and heritability in the survey were 32 percent of readers. If you understand heritability in the technical manner you have to understand additive genetic variance. This sets the floor for the number who truly understand the concept in the way I use on this weblog (I suspect some people who were exceedingly modest who basically understand the concept for ‘government purposes’ put themselves in the ‘maybe’ category’). After nearly 10 years of blogging (the first year or so of which I myself wasn’t totally clear on the issue!) that’s actually a pretty impressive proportion. You take what you can get.
Most people don’t understand “heritability”