We expect the genetic difference between two (or an arbitrary number of) groups that diverged from some common ancestral population to be zero under neutrality. This is a well-known result that I feel like isn’t discussed enough, especially in discussions around mean differences in traits such as IQ and educational attainment.
Dominance is a just a fancy-schmancy way of saying that the phenotypic effects of alleles at a single locus are not additive 💁♂️. Ok, but what does that mean?
The topic of this post was not on my radar 📡 but I don’t live under a rock and I’ve been following the recent developments with Elizabeth Warren and her much publicized ancestry results.
Quick recap: I mentioned last time that heritability = Vg / Vp, where Vg is the genetic variance among individuals and Vp is the total phenotypic difference among individuals. Furthermore, Vp = Vg + Ve, where Ve is the environmental variance contributing to phenotypic differences.
One of the reasons I’ve come to write about this is because recently I’ve been asked a lot about “how genetic is this trait or that trait?”. And I find myself responding with another question (yeah I’m that guy , get over it): “What do you mean by genetic?