Given a trait that can be expressed (and measured) in both parents (e.g weight, height, strength, speed), are there ever traits in the child that correlate better with one sex parent than the other? If so, can you give some examples. This could be in any species.
1 Answer
It has been shown in Drosophila that cross-sex heritability is low for lifespan, where within-sex heritability was three times greater than cross-sex heritability. This means that, sons more closely resemble their fathers and daughters more closely resemble their mothers. This could be considered one such example, if you consider the trait to be a sex-specific thing, i.e. that fathers have a greater influence on lifespan in sons than mothers do.
In humans (and numerous other species, e.g. Indian Meal Moth), it has been shown that several traits have small cross-sex genetic correlations, suggesting that (in such traits) the parent of the same sex is a better predictor of a child's trait value.
It is common (in quantitative genetics circles) to consider homologous traits in two sexes as separate traits (e.g. male lifespan and female lifespan are separate traits), and analyse them in a multivariate framework such as a G-matrix. They often have some genetic covariance between the sexes because of pleiotropy and linkage disequilibrium (though covariance by LD is generally more transient: see books on quantitative genetics by Lynch & Walsh, Falconer & Mackay, or Roff, for more reading).