Homework due Wednesday, December 11th at 4:10 pm. Please walk me through all the steps on how to solve this problem.
A farmer wishes to increase the average body weight in a herd of beef cattle. He begins with a herd that has a mean weight of 595 kg, but selects a pair of big breeding individuals that between them have a mean weight of 625 kg.
A group of 20 offspring were obtained from this group of selected parents, with weights of:
612, 587, 604, 589, 615, 641, 575, 605, 610, 598, 589, 620, 617, 577, 609, 633, 588, 599, 601, and 611 kg.
Calculate the heritability for body weight in this herd.
Remember, variance can be described in this context as the difference between means. We can estimate phenotypic variance by comparing the breeding individuals we selected to the total population. We can estimate genetic variance as the difference between the progeny and their parents.