Asking questions about heritability

ISG Workshop 2022 Day 7
1

Hi,

I would like to ask one simiple question but seems confusing me a little bit about heritability. Why is heritability is H2 but not H? I have tried to search for answers from Internet, but there seems to be no quick answers about it.

Regards

Xueying

2

Hi Xueying

Good question. How things get named is often odd. After all, why is variance represented with s2? (I couldn’t figure out how to superscript the 2 on the forum).
Heritability is a proportion of the variance. Since the variance is a squared metric, so too is heritability, hence h2.

3

Thank you very much, Katrina. I understand.

best
Xueying