From the course: Everyday Statistics, with Eddie Davila

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Genetics

Genetics

- [Instructor] Gregor Mendel was the pivotal figure in the world of genetics, and in the process he showed the world the relationship between genetics and statistics. Let's simplify Mendel's initial experiments. Mixing a tall plant varietal with a short plant would result in tall plants in the second generation. Tall was the dominant trait, but when you took two second-generation talls from this mix, the results were not always tall. 25% of the time the second-generation plant was short. How could this happen? Well, Mendel realized that the genes in these plants had two components, two alleles. A tall varietal would have two capital T alleles, these are dominant. A short varietal would have two lowercase t alleles, these are recessive. He put these two genes onto a square. For the first generation you have two capital T's on one side of the square. On the other side of the square you have two lowercase t's. The four quadrants of the square are the four possible outcomes. They are the…

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