Posted by:
rwoodyer
at Wed Apr 13 14:32:39 2005 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by rwoodyer ]
As a biologist myself, I have to disagree. While each egg does indeed have a 50/50 chance of being albino or het, the total resulting clutch population should also be approximately 50/50. In fact, that is the way geneticists determine if a trait is dominant/recessive/polygenic/sex-linked/incompletely dominant/etc...
Think of it this way, if you flip a coin you have a 50/50 chance of heads. If you flip that coin 100 times you should get approximately 50 heads. Punnet squares were originally developed to explain the percentages of offspring with given traits, so in fact they can be directly applied to prediction of offspring percentages. You might get something completely unpredictable if you only have 3 eggs, but probability is meaningless when you only consider 3 data points, you need to consider a significant sample size. So this is not a misapplication of genetics or its principles, but rather a misapplication of mathematics and probability.
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