This work presents an analysis of heterogeneity of environmental variance for slaughter weight (175 days) in pigs. This heterogeneity is associated with systematic and additive genetic effects. The model also postulates the presence of additive genetic effects affecting the mean and environmental variance. The study reveals the presence of genetic variation at the level of the mean and the vari...

Phenotypic plasticity and canalization are important topics in quantitative genetics and evolution. Both concepts are related to environmental sensitivity. The latter can be modeled using a model with genetically structured environmental variance. This work reports the results of a genetic analysis of adult weight in the snail Helix aspersa. Several models of heterogeneous variance are fitted u...

The dynamics of reproductive value are used to provide a simple derivation of Tuljapurkar's approximation for the long-run growth rate and environmental variance of lnN, in a density-independent age-structured population in a random environment. With no environmental autocorrelation, the dynamics of total population size, N, generally shows time lags and autocorrelation caused by life history, ...

BACKGROUND Although an obvious environmental factor influencing drug use, the sources of individual differences in drug availability (DA) are unknown. METHOD This report is based on 1788 adult males from the Mid-Atlantic Twin Registry who participated in a structured telephone interview that included retrospective assessments of DA (cigarette, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and stimulants) betwe...

Animal robustness, or environmental sensitivity, may be studied through individual differences in residual variance. These differences appear to be heritable, and there is therefore a need to fit models having breeding values explaining differences in residual variance. The aim of this report is to study whether breeding value estimation for environmental sensitivity (vEBV) can be performed on ...

Birthweight has implications for physical and mental health in later life. Using data from Caucasian twins collected in Australia, the Netherlands and the United States, and from East Asian twins collected in Japan and South Korea, we compared the total phenotypic, genetic and environmental variances of birthweight between Caucasians and East Asians. Model-fitting analyses yielded four major fi...

The most common method used to study the role of genetic factors for in development is to determine whether monozygotic (MZ) cotwins are linguistically more similar to one another than dizygotic (DZ) cotwins. Because MZ and DZ cotwins share essentially the same preand postnatal environment, whereas MZ cotwins share 100% of their DNA and DZ cotwins share only 50% of their DNA, if MZ cotwins are ...