Nerds Make Science Fun!

Making videos once a month is not going to cut it for me.

I seriously need to stop slacking.

Also, youtube’s new widescreen is pointless

Remember to keep track of your variables.

http://www.walfas.org/?p=583

I will make a video teaching integrals, eventually.

I finally got around to changing those links on the right. Nuff said.

If you’ve taken in biology in the past few years, you’d know it was only a matter of time before this showed up

William

To make sure you don’t end up like this person.

Edit: DON’T WORRY, RON PAUL WILL SAVE US FROM THE EVIL RAINBOWS!!!

Background:  As part of a series of posts regarding evolution, genetics, and the cell, we are giving you a little experiment regarding genetic drift. Genetic drift is the tendency for a gene pool to randomly accumulate small changes over time. These small changes eventually “add together” into large genetic changes.  This process is a key part of both descent with modification, and natural selection.

For this experiment, you will need:

30-50 of each of two colors of beans.
Paper bag
Pencil/paper.

Procedure:
Note the two colors of beans. For simplicity, we will call them white and brown. The white will represent a disadvantageous recessive allele, and the brown will represent the normal, dominant allele.

Place all the beans into the bag and shake well.
Two at a time, pull two beans from the bag, keeping count of the types of pairs (two brown, two white, one each).  If the pair is two white beans, set those aside.

Return all the beans except the white ones that you’ve set aside back into the bag. Repeat 2 or more times. Notice what happens to the number of white beans in the bag. This is similar to what can really happen in the real world, and is called genetic drift. Imagine the brown beans as a “produce fruit” gene for a plant and the white beans as a “don’t produce fruit” gene. It becomes obvious which gene wins out.

For a bonus experiment, try flipping three coins for any pair of beans that is brown, and remove if all three are heads, but only flip one coin for a pair of white beans, and removing the pair if it turns up heads. This turns the experiment into more realistic terms, with a camouflage gene instead of a ridiculous gene.

Check out this link for more: Genetic Drift

William