We had a fun time learning some genealogy as part of this unit. We asked the children's grandparents on both sides about some of their traits, and then tried to determine where we got some of our own traits based on that.
From what we read, this is not really a very accurate way of looking at traits. I guess even the traits that are typically thought of as being determined by one gene (like attached vs unattached earlobes) , scientists are finding, are actually more complicated and less easily categorized than that. But, finding out if you can roll your tongue or not is a time-honored tradition in genetics classes, so we did this anyway. And we liked it.
Here are some of the traits we surveyed (dominant traits are listed first):
- Unattached vs attached earlobes
- Can roll tongue into U-shape vs can't
- No widow's peak vs widow's peak
- Brown vs light (green or blue) eyes
- Index finger shorter than ring finger vs opposite
- Dark hair vs light hair
- Non-red vs red hair
- Curly hair vs straight hair
No comments:
Post a Comment