Biology Workshop

Why do some people have brown eyes, and others have blue eyes? And why do some have curly hair, while others have straight hair? Does it have to do with genes? Or DNA? Or Alleles? Those are all questions that we answered on October 16’s Biology Workshop led by Kasie Leung!

​In today’s workshop, we learned that the reason why we all have different physical features is because of alleles, which are variants of genes. Then, what are genes? Genes are packages of DNA. Because DNA is such a big part of genetics, or the study of how we inherit things from our parents, all of us became biologists for the day and created our own candy DNA models! We used different colored gummy bears as the nucleotide pairs, red vines as the phosphate backbones, and toothpicks as the bonds that keep the nucleotide pairs together. As one of the girls puts it: “Making the DNA models was really fun and taught us a lot about bonds… and it was also a really good snack!”

We also learned about Charles Darwin’s theory that evolution relies on mutation (the changing of a gene) and natural selection (the better survival of organisms that are better adapted to their environment). To replicate how mutations may happen, we played a game of telephone and saw how an original sentence could completely change after being whispered around a circle. Then to replicate how natural selection may happen, we created baby birds with genotypes decided by the flip of a coin. While those with wings and camouflage colors survived and reproduced, those with no wings and bright colors unfortunately were not “selected.” While that is unfortunate, what was super fortunate was that we were able to become new biologists and successfully learn about genetics and evolution!