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International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences

caveats and qualifiers, concluded that "the lheritability of limb number in humans is zero." That is, all the variance could be accounted for by variance in environment, and none of the variance was attributable to variance in genes. I triumphantly informed a locally notorious biological determinist (a known sociobiology sympathizer) that genes do not determine limb number in humans-to which he muttered a non sequitur about my mother's raising turkeys. I recount this history by way of introducing the elusive fact that hleritability is not a measure of the degree to which genes determine traits. Indeed, traits are not even subject to having heritability-only variances have heritabilities (the jargon of population genetics notwithstanding). Since variance is the average squared difference between the mean of a distribution and each data point in that distribution, it is an attribute of a collection of measures and not a trait of an organism. All traits of all living organisms are 100% the result of interaction between genes and environments (even when the measure of the trait for an individual is away from the mean). As Dobzhansky was fond of saying, asking whether a trait is more the result of genes or the result of the environment is like asking whether the square footage of a room is due more to its width or to its length. Of course, the professor was right about the heritability of limb number. One can contrast his finding with the finding that the heritability of eye color is 1.0. The traits are opposites in the sense that the variance in the former is due to variance in environments while the variance in the latter is due to variance in genes. However, it does not follow that eye color is genetically determined while limb number is not. I call attention to this point in an attempt to dispel the misconception that the veracity of a sociobiological analysis is contingent upon the heritability of the traits under consideration-a misconception unwittingly perpetuated by sociobiologists when they respond to the "charge" as if it were genuine. Selection theory concerns itself with the selective value of traits rather than the heritability of their variance. For example, a sociobiologist might put forth the argument hat males who are attracted to females are likely to gain a selective advantage over males who are not. As the argument proceeds, genes to that effect would be postulated and, if necessary, Mendelian co,nstraints on the spread of such genes would be considered. The argument would surely be subject to being wrong-but not on the grounds that its author failed to show a genetic difference between attracted and nonattracted contemporary males. In fact, if the argument were true, one would expect little or no genetic variance in this regard. That is, the higher the selective value of a trait, the more likely the phenotypic variance is to be the result of environmental variance (h2l ). That rule holds whenever the inquiry is into the already evolved nature of an organism. If speculations are being made about current or ongoing evolutionary changes (a less frequently addressed subject), then the trait's variance must have heritability h2 T. This relationship between the importance of a trait and its probability of having significant heritability over time seems to have been lost on some prominent proponents of the notion that racial differences in IQ scores are the result of racial differences in quality and/or quantity of genes for IQ. For example, Darlington (1979) argues: