Quantitative Genetics: How to Find Narrow Sense Heritability

Another use of heritability is to determine how a population will respond to selection. Typically parents with the phenotypic value of interest are selected from a base population. These parents are crossed, and a new population is developed.
The selection differential is the difference of the base population mean and the mean of the selected parents. The selection response is how much gain you make when mating the selected parents. Remember, the narrow sense heritability is a measure of the genetic component that is contributed by the additive genetic variance. The response to selection can thus be dervied by multiply the heriability by the selection differntial. The following example illustrates how we can predict the response to selection.