Controversies
Some authors like Steven Rose and Jay Joseph have dismissed heritability estimates as useless. Criticisms have also been raised with regards to the lack of progress in identifying causal genetic variants for many traits (Missing heritability problem). A 2008 paper in Nature Reviews Genetics stated however: "Despite continuous misunderstandings and controversies over its use and application, heritability remains key to the response to selection in evolutionary biology and agriculture, and to the prediction of disease risk in medicine. Recent reports of substantial heritability for gene expression and new estimation methods using marker data highlight the relevance of heritability in the genomics era." According to Eric Turkheimer, new molecular genetic methods of heritability estimation have demonstrated that the underlying assumptions of the classic twin design of human behavioral genetics are sound, "putting an end to an entire misguided school of thought among traditional opponents of classical quantitative (and by association behavioral) genetics."
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