How Are Inherited Traits Influenced by the Environment?
According to search engine trackers, the phrase “are inherited traits influenced by the environment?” is one of the most asked science questions online, with hundreds of hits on Google per day. On the surface though, it appears a needless question; of course traits that have a genetic component are also influenced by the environment. No behavioral genetic study has ever come up with a perfect heritability of 1.00 for a trait that varies within a population, least of all because measurement error limits reliable interpretation above approximately the 0.90 level (heritability runs on a scale of 0.00-1.00 like the correlation coefficient, where the variance accounted for is the coefficient squared). Most commonly, about half the variation of a given behavioral trait is due to environmental influences and half to genes. What the question really should be asking is not whether inherited traits are influenced by the environment, but how they are, because that’s where the answer becomes inter
