More On Nature And Nurture Among Thoroughbreds

A few days ago, I mentioned a story about the contention that thoroughbred racehorses owe their success more to rearing than to breeding. Despite the seemingly delicious contrarian stance, my gut was that there was more to the story.  That appears to be the case.

Over at ScienceBlogs (which, by the way, has become quite the burgeoning network of science blogs), the pseudonymous GrrlScientest takes a deeper look into the issue:

However, while it is true that the offspring of expensive stallions tended to win more over their lifetime, Wilson stated, genes played only a small role. In fact, the authors found that 8.5% of a racehorse's success was due to genetics. While a genetic effect of 8.5% sounds trivial to the casual observer, genetics typically accounts for only 1-2% of survival rates in the wild where environmental conditions vary tremendously and where an individual's survival can depend on luck as much as anything else. But because the authors deemed "success" in horse racing as being heavily dependent upon just one factor, winning races, they found that genetics plays a much bigger role in this situation.

The post also points out that there's a lot more to a horse's value than what it can produce in winnings -- namely, stud fees. So if the contribution of genetics is non-trivial and if a horse with good genes can garner better stud fees, than the high prices paid relative to winnings won't look so out of whack. Good training/management must still be important, hence the price paid to good trainers, but there may not be the raging inefficiencies in the market that the original paper would suggest.

And as I've noted before, my own personal, cursory review of the literature does suggest a fairly efficient market.

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