Heritability

Heritability is a statistic used in breeding and genetics works that estimates how much variation in a phenotypic trait in a population is due to genetic variation among individuals in that population. It is calculated with the following equation (for broad-sense heritability): H^2 = VG/VP. Other causes of measured variation in a trait are characterized as environmental factors, including measurement error. In human studies of heritability these are often apportioned into factors from "shared environment" and "non-shared environment" based on whether they tend to result in persons brought up in the same household more or less similar to persons who were not.