Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Coming To Terms With Heritability, Scott F. Stoltenberg

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

The complex mechanisms of heredity are little appreciated by nonspecialists, in some measure, because of misunderstandings that are perpetuated when words used for technical terms have other, more widely understood, folk meanings. When a word has both technical and folk meanings, it is the responsibility of the specialist to avoid promoting confusion by either using extremely cautious and precise language when using the term or, in cases when confusion is inevitable, abandoning the term in favor of one without a widely understood folk meaning. The study of heredity is beset by such confusion, and the term heritability appears to be …