Thursday, March 11, 2010

Biology: Chip off the old block



This week the kids carried out a simulation in which they flipped coins to see which genes they would pass on to their offspring, the offspring being different kinds of smiley faces. In this simulation, each parent was heterozygous for the 12 traits carried by smiley faces. Despite the fact the parents all shared the same genotype, the offspring displayed a wide range of variation. We discussed the importance of chance and how the number of potential combinations grows as the number of traits or more accurately, chromosomes increase.

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