Saturday, June 2, 2012

Yahtzee! and Poker

(photo Rios Coronado, Black Dutch Junior Buck)

My #3 son Oscar and I were talking about our old 4H meetings and how his knowledge of genetics comes from 4H rabbit projects. We used to play the dice game "Yahtzee" where you roll dice trying to fill in patterns on a score sheet. When you roll the first time you might get three dice with three showing. So you save your threes and roll the rest of the dice trying to get more threes. After playing a while, we started discussion how Genetics can be like that. We may be trying to get black Dutch rabbits. By breeding two black dutch we set the self gene (aa) and the black gene (B-). Those dice we saved. Now we roll the remaining dice (breed the rabbits) and wait for the result. Hopefully the markings will be in the right places. Sometimes a blue will pop out if there is blue in the background of both the buck and doe. That's part of the gamble when breeding for color.

Another game for teaching genetics involves playing cards and the game Poker. You hold a couple of cards and try to pick up better cards to make the desired winning hand. I tell people that bringing in outside blood is like mixing in another deck and trying to predict what cards will dealt out to the players. It takes a few games (generations) to pull out the cards (genes) that you don't want to have the genes that you want as the remaining cards. 

Have a good day!

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