A test of the hypothesis that the lack of non-additive variance observed in populations of humans or animals is because gene frequencies near 0.5 are much less common than those more extreme, not because non-additive effects are absent, is to compare variance components among populations with different gene frequency profiles. For crops such as maize and for laboratory animals, estimates can be got both from outbreds and from populations with gene frequencies of one-half derived from crosses of inbred lines. There are a limited number of possible contrasts and linkage confounds comparisons of variation in F2 and later inter se generations, however, so it is difficult to partition variation between single locus and epistatic components (e.g. [17] ch. 7).
