Morph Genetics: Allele Math from First Principles
Stop memorizing Punnett squares. Understand dominant, recessive, and incomplete-dominant inheritance well enough to design a pairing on a napkin.
Morph genetics looks like wizardry from the outside and like simple bookkeeping from the inside. Every visual trait in your collection traces back to alleles — versions of a gene — and a small set of inheritance rules that, once internalized, let you predict any clutch without a chart.
The three words that explain almost everything
Before any math, three terms do most of the work: allele (a version of a gene), homozygous (two matching copies), and heterozygous (two different copies). Almost every morph conversation is really an argument about how many copies of which allele an animal carries — and what those copies show.
Recessive traits
A recessive trait only appears when an animal carries two copies of the allele. One copy makes a visually-normal 'het' carrier. This is why two normal-looking animals can produce a striking visual offspring — both parents were hets, and the clutch rolled the 25% that inherited a copy from each…
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- Dominant & incomplete-dominant inheritance (and why 'co-dom' is usually a misnomer)
- The 'super' form: what happens with two copies of an incomplete-dominant allele
- Stacking genes: designing multi-trait pairings step by step
- Probability without Punnett squares: the fraction shortcut
- Worked examples: building a target animal across two generations
- Ethics of lethal & deleterious combos — what not to pair
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