{"id":39659,"date":"2011-04-13T18:41:06","date_gmt":"2011-04-14T02:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=10865"},"modified":"2011-04-13T18:41:06","modified_gmt":"2011-04-14T02:41:06","slug":"i-am-not-a-genetic-blend-of-my-parents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/04\/13\/i-am-not-a-genetic-blend-of-my-parents\/","title":{"rendered":"I am not a genetic blend of my parents"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the aspects of genetics which I think tends to reoccur is that people have a fixation on the two extreme ends of visible genetic inheritance. On the one hand you have discrete Mendelian or quasi-Mendelian traits where most of the variation is controlled by only a few genes, and which may exhibit dominance\/recessive expression patterns. And you also have the classic quantitative traits which exhibit continuous variation and a normal distribution. Mendelism leads to strange ideas about atavism\/throwbacks, and a promiscuous utilization of the idea of dominance\/recessivity (e.g., &#8220;non-white genes are dominant to white genes&#8221;). Continuous traits are more comprehensible in their confusion, as they are the intuitions which led to the models of &#8220;blending inheritance&#8221; which were in the air before the triumph of Mendelian genetics in the first decade of the 20th century. But they lead to the logical inference that variation should slowly &#8220;blend away&#8221; through admixture. This was a major problem with 19th century models of evolution through natural selection; blending eliminated the variation which was necessary for the action of selection to be effective. A blending model also explains why there is a common perception that racial admixture will lead to the elimination &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/gU_pX9KzE3U\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the aspects of genetics which I think tends to reoccur is that people have a fixation on the two extreme ends of visible genetic inheritance. On the one hand you have discrete Mendelian or quasi-Mendelian traits where most of the variation is co&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics","category-genomics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39659"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39807,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39659\/revisions\/39807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}