Final Report from Lincoln-West High School

Hello my name is Alex Sias and I was designated as the class leader of this project. Our biology class just finished a unit on genetics so we were very familiar with genetic terms such as dominant and recessive traits. This aided in our abililty to complete the project in plenty of time. We were able to cooperate and work together to retrieve the data that was needed.

This project reinforced what we had just learned from our unit on genetics. The most exciting aspect was working on this collaborative project as a group and working with schools from around the world.

Based on the data we collected, we found the outcome to be very surprising. We thought that the dominant trait would have been more visible but our data showed that the recessive trait showed up more than the dominant traits in the people we surveyed.

If we had a chance to do this project again or speak to the project leader, we would suggest that someone re-tally the data collected so the totals are equal. We found several schools that had different total numbers for each trait. Another suggestion we would make is to have other traits to observe such as eye color or widows peak.

The procedure we used to analyze the large quantities of data was finding the mode, mean and median and comparing the six countries.

The frequency range is the percentage of people that will actually recieve the dominant trait. We found in earlobes the frequency range was 56%, white forelock was 73%, dimples was 80%, thumb was 67%, bent pinky was 64%, and the mid-digit hair frequency range was 97%.

We observed that there was no relationship because even though a number shows up a lot if it is recessive it will still not become dominant no matter how many times it shows.

We learned that not many people from our survey had red-green color blindness and those that did were mostly males. With this information, we assumed that is must be a recessive disorder that occurs mostly in males and we learned that it is inherited from the mother.

In addition to these questions, we decided to compare the six countries. According to the data all the schools had free earlobes more visible, Lithuania had white forelock more visible, Australia barely had people with dimples, USA had more people with color blindness, Taiwan, South Africa, and Canada didn't have big differences between the dominant and recessive traits. We found that Australia and the U.S. have more people with dominant traits. We think it's because they have a bigger population.

We thought this project was interesting and very educational. We're glad we had the opportunity to do a world wide search for the dominant trait. Thank you for this chance and we hope to do it again next year.