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Why a Heritability Estimate Changes With Sample and Setting

Second misreading: treating heritability as a constant of the trait. It is a ratio whose denominator is the environmental and demographic variance present in the studied sample, so a different sample gives a different number for the same trait. The seed paper's 17% came from 12,901 Icelanders aged 18 to 93, mean age 54.1, 56% female — a specific population, not humanity.

Questions this Concept answers

Why does one trait yield different heritability figures in different samples?

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Heritability of Individual Differences in Psychology

Heritability is a statistic describing the proportion of observed phenotypic variance in a population that is attributable to genetic variance, quantifying the degree to which genetic differences amo…