Tuesday August 16, 2005 
Tuesday August 16, 2005 Nature had a cute letter about using the Harry Potter craze to introduce the concept of Mendelian genetics to children. The letter pointed out that wizarding appears to be a recessive trait. Children of wizard parents are wizards, but children of muggle parents or mixed relationships also have a chance of being wizards, just as would be expected. We can predict that muggle parents who produce one wizard child have a one in four chance of producing a wizard each time, since they must both be heterozygous. Like this:
MW x mw
Mm - muggle
Mw - muggle
Wm - muggle
Ww - wizard
Probably more interesting than wrinkly peas as an example...
Tags: Biology, Genetics, Teaching
( Aug 16 2005, 01:06:44 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]