[HPforGrownups] Re: The Creevey brothers

[Amanda Lewanski]

No: HPFGUIDX 6381

nlpnt at yahoo.com wrote:

>  Put these together (and leave aside that immaculate conception Lucas
> threw in on us!)  and you get the notion that if there's a
> Spoonbender Gene, it's genetically dominant- this of course begs the
> question of why are they a minority?

Perhaps it's a case of a combination of genes. Individually, they do not
influence talent significantly, but in combination, they flare to the fore.
Sort of a more complicated version of blue eyes, where it can be carried but
must come from both sides to show up physically.

On the other hand, as I recall, there are dominant genes that still only
show up a fraction of the time--I get a glimmer of memory involving attached
earlobes. I don't recall the mechanics of this. But dominance has nothing to
do with distribution or frequency--it just means that if the gene is there,
its result will show. A very dominant gene can have a very small
distribution, and the actual increase of the percentage of those having the
gene in the population as a whole changes only very slowly---as the minority
with the dominant gene have kids, so does everyone else, so the spread of
such things tends to be very slow.

In any case, if the Creevy brothers had the same parents, I see no reason
for them both to have had the talent. An accident of birth. Like one or two
blue-eyeds, in a gaggle of dark-eyed kids. They just happened to get the
combination. Who says they're the only Creevy kids? My children will all be
tall, taller than me or their dad, because they get it from my mom's side.
It skipped a generation, but came through in all three. Random selection
doeth weird things.

--Amanda