Heritability height

Jensen This is especially interesting because the heritability of height is 0.95. This shows the independence of the heritability and the mean value. Now an interesting question is, why have psychologists got so worked up over the Flynn effect for IQ, while there s been no great excitement about this Flynn effect for height ... 

Since the first publication in 2005, GWAS studies have successfully identified hundred of genetic variants associated with complex diseases and important phenotypes. Despite the early success, most identified variants individually or in combination confer relatively small increments in risk and explain only a small proportion of heritability. For example, in the genetics analyses of height, a classic complex trait with an estimated heritability of 80 %, at least 40 loci showed significant association however, in total they only explain about 5 % of phenotypic variance in analyses of tens of thousands of people [103]. One possible contributor to the small genetic effect sizes observed so far is that researchers have incompletely... 

However, it turned out that something was wrong with these methods. For example, in height, which has a heritability of 80%, only approximately 5% has been explained by the 50 common polymorphisms identified by GWAS. It was similar in other cases as well. There are several explanations for this. One of the theories states that these common traits are influenced by rare variants rather than by common ones, and rare variants cannot be measured by this method [29]. The other popular theory states that the traditional statistical methods are not suitable for analyzing so many variants at the same time, and are unable to find the interactions, which can be responsible for a considerable fraction of the heritability. 

Bower, R.C., and F.C. Yeh. 1988. Heritability and gain calculations for six-year height of coastal western white pine in British Columbia. Can. J. Plant Sci. 68 1191-1196. 

High levels of genetic variation in jack pine growth have been documented in numerous studies. Table 1 hsts a sampling of individual and family heritabilities reported for height growth from sites in the central to eastern range (Manitoba [MB], Ontario [ON], Wisconsin [WTj and New Brunswick [NB]). 

Table 1. Examples of jack pine individual (h ) and half-sib family (h d heritabilities for height.

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