wizards and muggles and squibs... OH MY!

[Athena Appleton]

if theres no such thing as a purely muggle family, is there no such thing as a purely wizard family? i mean, sure, the malfoys and a couple others claim that they are 100% pure blood, but is that really very likely? i mean, some where along the line, in all those years, some wizard relative of theirs must have had a kid with a muggle......

what is it Hagrid said in CoS? That there's "not a wizard a life" that's not half-blood or less... he must be including the Malfoys and all the other "pureblood" families, too...

also.... which came first: muggles or wizards? if all wizards have a hint of wizard ancestry in them some time, they must have come first, and then muggles just developed from generations of squibs... if not, if muggles came first, then wizards must have popped up magically (hehe) somewhere along the line, so chances are it could happen again and it is possible that wizards can pop out of 100% muggle families, without even a trace of magic blood...

haha... so many questions, so few answers

[slava]

wow im very confused.

[Ferrus]

also.... which came first: muggles or wizards? if all wizards have a hint of wizard ancestry in them some time, they must have come first, and then muggles just developed from generations of squibs... if not, if muggles came first, then wizards must have popped up magically (hehe) somewhere along the line, so chances are it could happen again and it is possible that wizards can pop out of 100% muggle families, without even a trace of magic blood...

Sounds like a bit of a Chicken-and-Egg question, but I always thought that Wizards appeared from muggle families and then got together over a long and slow process, of course the number of wizards tend to increase because wizard parents have wizard children (except Squibs, but they are rare) and some muggle parents get Wizards children.

[pinky p]

i don't know who mentioned it, but someone said that at one point wizards only married wizards, but then they started dying off so they were forced to start marrying muggles to survive. if thats true, it certainly makes sense that wizards came first. i guess i like the idea that muggles are really only generations and generations of squibs

[Athena Appleton]

the true sign that you have too much time on your hands: you get on a Harry Potter message board and start discussing philosophy.

Pinky, I think Ron is the one who says the wizarding race would have been dying off if they hadn't married muggles... not positive, I think it's in book 2...

[TDM]

Lily Potter were considered a witch, why is Harry considered half-blood? when both of his parents were magical? my theory:

breeding is way too complicated, no matter what the species or special trait. we could look at this from a scientific view:

X=one side of magic

O=one side of muggle

o=one muggle born

x=one side of squib

okay, in this excercise, the capital letters are the dominant genes, since if you breed two magics, the chances are you will get a magic offspring. anyway, it would look like this:

XX+XX=XX, XX, XX, & XX (all pure blood)

XX+OO=XO, XO, XO, & XO (all half blood)

here's where it gets complicated

XX+Xx= XX, XX, Xx, & Xx (all techinally pure blood, but they carry the recessive, or weaker, squib trait)

now, let's take one Xx, and breed it with another Xx (very rare when they find each other)

Xx+Xx=XX, Xx, Xx, and xx (3 pure, one squib)


now, for the muggle side of it:

OO+OO= OO, OO, OO, and OO

OO=Oo= OO, OO, Oo, and Oo (once again, take the Oo and breed it with Oo)

Oo+Oo= OO, Oo, Oo, oo (1 normal muggle, 2 muggles w/ magic recessive trait, and one muggle born magic person)

now, take lily (oo, which is really a XX, because she got one from each her parents), and James (XX, i believe), and mix them together:

XX+oo= Xo, Xo, Xo, and Xo. (harry)

so, anyone who followed that, this means that harry is actually a pure blood, because his mother was a witch.

whew!

[Ferrus]

yes thats right, but harry is still technically half-blood because:

OO+oo(Lily)= Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo which is all children would be muggles with potentailly magical offsrping which I imagine is the case with Dudley. The key piont is that oo is not the same as XX because the children these relations have are different.

an interesting point would be:

xx+oo= xo-xo-xo-xo Where does that take us?

and also

OO+XX=OX-OX-OX-OX Are the children magical or not?


Wierd discussing Mendels laws on a Harry Potter forum...

[choki]

Oh god...now I am really confused... I guess it is very hard to discuss magical inheritance through Mendel's Law.

In any case, the simplest way to think about all these is;

- Magic abilities are bestowed on those who are fortunate (or misfortunate in terms of one's circumstance) For eg. if Harry's parents weren't wizard/witch, he might still have them living...oh well this is also hard to explain

The reason why I said magic abilities are bestowed is because not every descendents of a wizard (pure-blood family) will eventually become a wizard/witch.

[Athena Appleton]

yeah... i failed this part in biology in high school...

Know what I really think about the "why is Harry called a half-breed" question? That prejudice people don't have to be consistant... I think that seems to happen a lot in these books, and in life... Voldemort, as the heir of Slytherin, hates Muggles and "mudbloods", but he is a mudblood himself... Prejudice isn't based on rational thoughts, so irrational comments are going to come out...

[Ferrus]

well, the only "problem" is that you are giving the possiblity of a Squib being born a greater probablity than which it seems to have. I mean that according to Ron (in CoS) Squibs are even more rare than muggle-born wizards, so it would be more logical that wizards should originate from muggles instead of the other way round, don´t you think?

[Athena Appleton]

this thread is giving me the mother of all headaches...

New question to throw into the mix, discussed in "a different mrs. figg theory"... the chances of squibs being born as siblings...

Rare diseases can be seen in siblings, it happens all the time. Could it be that the only two squibs we know are siblings, so if, say, two wizards get together and are both "squib carriers" there's a better chance more than one child could be a squib...?

[TDM]

dangit, squid! you confused me with my own tactics. it made a whole bunch of sense when i posted it, but now when i reread it, i'm lost in it, too. anyway, that was a long and pointless post that i think i got dumber from writing, and i'm sure that all of your IQs have lowered from reading. anyway, i'm full of nonsense, but it was interesting, no?

[Athena Appleton]

I'm not sure if I'm dumber for having read it, since after seeing one too many X's and O's I decided it looked like one LONG game of tic-tac-toe and I quit reading it altogether

[Ferrus]

well, its confusing, but my only point is that its more "logical" that wizards come from muggles, and that Squibs are a sort of "fall-back" into non-magicness instead of that Muggles should come from sucesive generations of Squibs due to the fact that wizard born muggles (Squibs) are rarer that mugle-born wizards.


P.S. I hope my I.Q. doesnt go to much down, I´ve got exams on the horizon...

[Athena Appleton]

oy... okay, new question that's being talked about in theories but really needs to be discussed here:

Is it more likely that two squibs (which we know are really rare) are brother and sister? There's some thoughts about the possibility that Filch and Mrs. Figg are siblings.

Like, if we're getting into the genes thing of wizard/muggle/squib thing, it could work the same way rare genetic diseases can work in humans. For example, the only two people that I know that have multiple sclerosis are brothers... something about the genetic makeup of their parents made their children prone to multiple sclerosis... *shrug*

Then, one guy had a good point, though, that he doesn't think J.K. Rowling is doing the whole biological gene thing with wizards and squibs, and I'm kinda not sure how I feel about that...