Mendel and his derned peas. Mendelian inheritance is so important to understanding inheritance in general, but gosh, peas are boring. As are most normal discreet traits in people - by normal, I mean stuff like attached earlobes and sticky earwax, cleft chin, tongue-rolling, and the ever popular PTC tasting. (Sorry to those who are tasters! Anthro is not usually about torturing students with nasty tasting paper, really! )
But what I think is cool about Mendel is how he figured out inheritance without seeing chromosomes, or seeing meiosis in action. And how he wowed everyone with statistics. Basic stats to us now, but way above most scientists' heads at the time.
Maybe next time I'll forgo talking about peas altogether and talk only about human traits, and do Punnett squares related to the normal traits and also the interesting diseases, like albinism, Tay-Sachs, and such. But it's like denying 7 years of undergrad and grad training to skip the peas!
but maybe it's time for a new leaf (pun intended).
Pass the peas, please.
Let's talk disease!
Thoughts?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment