NATURAL HERITABILITIES: CAN THEY BE RELIABLY ESTIMATED IN THE LABORATORY?

Evolution

Department of Biology, McGill University, 1205 Docteur Penfield Avenue, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 1B1, Canada.

Published: December 1996

The validity of the assumption, that laboratory estimates of heritabilities will tend to overestimate natural heritabilities, due to a reduction in environmental variability and thus the phenotypic variance of traits, is examined. One hundred sixty-five field estimates of narrow sense heritabilities derived from the literature are compared with 189 estimates from laboratory studies on wild, outbred animal populations derived from the data set of Mousseau and Roff. The results indicate that 84% of field heritabilities are significantly different from zero and that for morphological, behavioral, and life-history traits there are no significant differences between laboratory and field estimates of heritability. Unexpectedly, mean heritabilities for morphological and life-history traits are actually higher in the field than in the lab. Twenty-two cases were found for which both laboratory and natural heritabilities had been estimated on the same traits. For this subset of the data, laboratory heritabilities tended to be higher than field estimates, but the difference was not significant. Also, the correlation between lab and field estimates was high (r = 0.6, P < 0.001), and the regression slope did not differ significantly from one. The major implications of this study are that laboratory estimates of heritability should generally provide reasonable estimations of both the magnitude and the significance of heritabilities in nature.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.1996.tb03605.xDOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

field estimates
16
natural heritabilities
12
laboratory estimates
8
heritabilities
8
heritabilities morphological
8
life-history traits
8
estimates heritability
8
higher field
8
estimates
7
laboratory
6

Similar Publications

Purpose: To investigate the effect of average intraocular pressure (IOP) on the true rate of glaucoma progression (RoP) in the United Kingdom Glaucoma Treatment Study (UKGTS).

Methods: UKGTS participants were randomized to placebo or Latanoprost drops and monitored for up to two years with visual field tests (VF, 24-2 SITA standard), IOP measurements, and optic nerve imaging. We included eyes with at least three structural or functional assessments (VF with <15% false-positive errors).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Dung predicts the global distribution of herbivore grazing pressure in drylands.

Nat Food

January 2025

Laboratorio de Biodiversidad y Funcionamiento Ecosistémico, Instituto de Recursos Naturales y Agrobiología de Sevilla (IRNAS), CSIC, Sevilla, Spain.

Dryland grazing sustains millions of people worldwide but, when poorly managed, threatens food security. Here we combine livestock and wild herbivore dung mass data from surveys at 760 dryland sites worldwide, representing independent measurements of herbivory, to generate high-resolution maps. We show that livestock and wild herbivore grazing is globally disconnected, and identify hotspots of herbivore activity across Africa, the Eurasian grasslands, India, Australia and the United States.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Rare earth elements (REEs) are a critical global focus due to their increasing use, raising concerns about their environmental distribution and human exposure, both vital to food safety and human health. Surface soil (0-30 cm) and corresponding rice grain samples (n = 85) were collected from paddy fields in Taiwan. This study investigated the total REE contents in soil through aqua regia digestion, as well as their labile forms extracted using 0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The issue of whether a salient stimulus in the visual field captures attention in a stimulus-driven manner has been debated for several decades. The attentional window account proposed to resolve this issue by claiming that a salient stimulus captures attention and interferes with target processing only when an attentional window is set wide enough to encompass both the target and the salient distractor. By contrast, when a small attentional window is serially shifted among individual stimuli to find a target, no capture is found.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Deceptive illusory cues can influence orthogonally directed manual length estimations.

Atten Percept Psychophys

January 2025

School of Kinesiology, Louisiana State University, 1250 Huey P. Long Field House, 50 Field House Drive, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803, USA.

We examined participants' abilities to manually estimate one of two perpendicular line segment lengths using curved point-to-point movements. Configurations involved symmetrical, unsymmetrical, and no bisection in upright and rotated orientation alterations to vertical-horizontal (V-H) illusions, where people often perceive longer vertical than horizontal segments for equal segment lengths. Participants used two orthogonally directed movements for length estimations: positively proportional (POS) - where greater fingertip displacement involved longer length estimation between configuration intersection start position and fingertip end, and negatively proportional (NEG) - where greater fingertip displacement from the screen edge start position toward configuration intersection involved a shorter length estimation between configuration intersection and fingertip end.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!