Selection on heritable heterozygosity but no response to selection. Why?

Received; accepted Manuscript was prepared with AASTeX peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not. http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/026492doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Sep. 9, 2015; – 2 – The realisation that heterozygosity can be heritable has recently generated some elegant research. However, none of this work has discussed the fact that when heterozygote advantage occurs, heterozygosity can be heritable, yet allele frequencies remain at equilibrium and do not evolve with time. From a quantitative genetic perspective this means the character is heritable, is under selection, yet no response to selection is observed. We explain why this is the case, and discuss potential implications for the study of evolution in the wild. Main text Heterozygosity-fitness correlations are often reported from natural population