As I gave a nod to statistical tricks and subtle shell games very recently, the material I review subsequently should be viewed with skepticism and caution. A few days ago I also pointed to a paper which describes and models intergenerational transfers of wealth across various societies. In other words, what parents transmit to children. From the perspective of someone who reads this blog, obviously parents transmit genes to their offspring.
To the left is an old scatterplot from Francis Galton which shows the dependence of the height of children upon the average height of parents. Obviously you have to take into account sex, but if you use standard deviation units and control for gender it works fine. There is a close relationship here between the axes, though it is not perfect. In modern developed societies the heritability of height is ~0.8-0.9. That means that 80-90% of the variance of ...
