- Title
- A philosophical study of heritability
- Creator
- Mncube, Zinhle
- Subject
- Nature and nurture, Behavior genetics, Genetic psychology, Environmental psychology
- Date
- 2016
- Type
- Masters (Thesis)
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10210/227052
- Identifier
- uj:22970
- Description
- M.A. (Philosophy), Abstract: The purpose of my dissertation is to ask the question, what non-statistical reality underlies heritability claims? But in order to ask this question, I must deal with the prior question – does it ever make sense to causally interpret heritability claims? The consensus answer to this question is “no”. Firstly, I argue that is possible to reply to each of the main lines of argument used to establish that heritability estimates are causally uninterpretable – (i) the existence of gene-environment interaction, (ii) the existence of G-E correlation, and (iii) the locality of heritability estimates. Therefore the consensus that “heritability estimates are devoid of causal implications” (Sesardic, 2005:10) is too quick. Specifically, (a) when there is no statistical gene-environment interaction (Sesardic, 2005; Tal, 2009, 2012), (b) when there is small to no geneenvironment correlation (Tal, 2009, 2012), and (c) within the domain of populations that have similar causally salient features, it makes sense to causally interpret a heritability estimate as a measure of the causal strength of differences in genes on total phenotypic variance. Secondly, when a heritability estimate is correctly used to express a causal fact, I argue that it suffers from the same problem that other measures of strength of association suffer from – the causal interpretation problem (or CIP). That is, when we say that heritability is a “measure of the proportion of the variance in a particular trait in a particular population that is attributed with genetic variation in that population” (Kaplan, 2006:56), the mathematics does not tell us how to interpret “attributable to/with”. Viewed in this light, the epistemological problem about heritability analysis...
- Contributor
- Broadbent, A., Prof.
- Language
- English
- Rights
- University of Johannesburg
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