Final Report for Taipei American School

We are from the Taipei American School in Taipei, Taiwan. As eighth graders, we study various areas of science, such as biology, chemistry, genetics, and electricity. We entered this project wanting to know more about dominant and recessive traits and their appearance in the population of the world.

We discovered that there was not a definite relationship between whether a trait was dominant or recessive and how frequently it occurs in the population. For example, a white forelock is a dominant trait, but the results of this survey found that a minority of people have white forelocks. In this, the results of the project did not match our expectations. We had believed that the dominant trait was always the most common.

We believe that the reason for this is due to many factors. For one, there might have been the occurrence of natural selection. Sometimes, having a recessive trait might be an asset. For example, many people of African decent have sickle-cell anemia, even though it is a recessive trait. This was because people with sickle-cell amemia did not contract malaria, so therefore it was actually a benefit to have this disease. And while having a curved thumb may not matter much in terms of natural selection, perhaps the gene for thumb shape is linked to another gene that does play a greater role in life.

Upon error analysis, we realized that there were a few flaws in this project. For one, there was variety lacking because most of the schools participating were from the U.S., with very few schools from Asia, Africa, or South America. There might also have been an element of student error in the data-gathering process. There were many opportunities for typographical errors in entering the data. Furthermore, many of the traits were not obvious, such as mid-digit hair, and so they may have been recorded incorrectly.

All in all, this project was a valuable learning experience.

Jacqueline Hu

Maggie Hsu