Assessing the impact of pedigree attributes on the validity of quantitative genetic parameter estimates
Published in Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 2025
Estimates of heritability and additive genetic variance in wild and historical populations are only as good as the pedigrees they are built on — and those pedigrees are almost always incomplete, unevenly deep, and assembled for reasons that had nothing to do with quantitative genetics.
This study assesses how sensitive quantitative genetic parameter estimates are to variation in pedigree quality and to model specification. The results bear directly on how much confidence to place in genetic parameters recovered from retrospective human genealogies and long-term wild population studies.
Recommended citation: Mawass, W., and Milot, E. (2025). "Assessing the impact of pedigree attributes on the validity of quantitative genetic parameter estimates." Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 38(4), 439–456.