Heritability

The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy is an online repository, maintained by Stanford University, which has been publishing entries and essays on philosophical topics for the last quarter century. Darwin’s theory of evolution, one of the pillars of modern biology, has been the starting point of many philosophical debates. Consequently, a considerable number of entries in the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy deal with this theory issues related to it. One of such entries, presented below, tackles the complicated topic of heritability. To understand how traits, change from across generations and the effect of selection on the frequency of traits in a population, one has to understand heritability. Misunderstanding this concept can lead to erroneous assumptions about the nature of genetic differences between human populations. The authors of this entry manage to explain the conceptual foundations of heritability and its importance to the theory of organic evolution with clarity. In addition, they demonstrate the difficulties in measuring heritability in natural populations.