Influences 1

I’ve used the notes on “Estimadores del valor genético aditivo en animales. I. Una fuente de información” on and off for the last 34 years.

Prof Ximena García gave me a copy when I was doing her course in 1992, my last year of undergraduate forestry. Funny thing is that this was a postgraduate course, taught in the Department of Animal Production, which was part of Agronomy, not Forestry. I took the course for no credits, just for the fun of learning quantitative genetics. Yes, it sounds weird when I put it that way. We were only two students: a postgrad and myself, and we learnt a lot.

There was a lot of doing his small things by hand, like the regression of additive value on phenotype. Typically the slope of a regression of Y on X is Cov(X,Y)/V(X), so

$$ \frac{Cov(P,A)}{V(P)} = \frac{Cov(A+D+I,A)}{V(P)} = \\ \frac{Cov(A,A)+Cov(D,A)+Cov(I,A)}{V(P)} = \\ \frac{Cov(A,A)+0+0}{V(P)} = \frac{V(A)}{V(P)} = h^2 $$

which helped me understand the idea of heritability; cool, I think.

The cover has lost good part of its colour, and the pages are typewritten, no fancy fonts for the huge number of equations.

Thanks for the book, Ximena, which still is in my office bookshelf after all these years.