Heresy 190

[LynnS]

24 minutes ago, ravenous reader said:

Except in nature, blue eyes is not a dominant trait.  That all Robert's offspring have the blue eyes is GRRM's poetic license.  It's probably best not to learn genetics from ASOIAF @LynnS.

LOL! It is fantasy after all.  I don't think I've met anyone with purple eyes before.

[Lord Carion of the Crow]

6 hours ago, ravenous reader said:

Except in nature, blue eyes is not a dominant trait.  That all Robert's offspring have the blue eyes is GRRM's poetic license.  It's probably best not to learn genetics from ASOIAF @LynnS.

Very true ravenous reader. I'm working on my own grim dark epic fantasy series. Genetics and inheritance will definitely be something fun to play with. Just the idea of magicical abilities being a genetic trait to inherit and what not is extremely interesting to me. But then again. I'm quite the nerd. 

[LynnS]

38 minutes ago, Lord Carion of the Crow said:

7 hours ago, ravenous reader said:

Except in nature, blue eyes is not a dominant trait.  That all Robert's offspring have the blue eyes is GRRM's poetic license.  It's probably best not to learn genetics from ASOIAF @LynnS.

Very true ravenous reader. I'm working on my own grim dark epic fantasy series. Genetics and inheritance will definitely be something fun to play with. Just the idea of magicical abilities being a genetic trait to inherit and what not is extremely interesting to me. But then again. I'm quite the nerd. 

The blue eyes of death that has Ned has so exercised in GoT and Melisandre says it's not their knives you have to fear; it's their eyes.  A dominant magical gene makes sense to me in the Starks without the madness of the Targs.

[Black Crow]

1 hour ago, LynnS said:

The blue eyes of death that has Ned has so exercised in GoT and Melisandre says it's not their knives you have to fear; it's their eyes.  A dominant magical gene makes sense to me in the Starks without the madness of the Targs.

Depends how you define sanity. Are Targaryens insane - or is it when their dragons. Are Starks sane - or only until their wolves take over?

[LynnS]

5 minutes ago, Black Crow said:

Depends how you define sanity. Are Targaryens insane - or is it when their dragons. Are Starks sane - or only until their wolves take over?

I do think Ghost displays a kind of beserker rage when he fights off Othor and perhaps Jon's black ice, bloody sword dream has something of Ghost in it.

Was Aerys mad?  No question but he wasn't far off about consuming fire to be transformed into a dragon or a R'hllorist 

 

[Luddagain]

I also have studies a bit of genetics and I do not find the whole Black hair dominant stuff as strange or impossible. There are lots of reasonable genetic explanations. one is as BC mentioned there could be a number of dominant genes on several chromosomes any one of which could trigger the Baratheon look. Another might be trigger gene that was needed to express the gene. Thus a blond haired person may actually have a black hair gene but need the trigger to allow it to show. A third and perhaps more likely given we are dealing in fantasy is that for Baratheons, the gene for black hair and blue eyes is linked (co-located) on a chromosome near an unrelated but crucial for living gene. This the 50% of Baratheon sperm that do not have this  essential gene will die quickly and never produce babies.

[Luddagain]

BC

There is a perfectly logical genetically correct pattern whereby all the stark kids are wargs but not Ned.

Assume that to be a warg you need two genes - a dominant W gene such that all those who are WW or Ww could potentially warg. However you ALSO need a recessive skin changer gene  eg ss.

 

Now if ned like many starks had a genotype WWSs he could not warg because he was not a skin changer.  If Catelyn had the skin changing gene (highly likely given she comes from the Riverlands where there are lots of Blackwoods) but not the Warg gene she also could not warg although she potentially might skin change another animal. Her genotyope is wwSS.

All of the children would be WwSs ie they could warg.

Potentially their are 100 special genes given to families in the pact. What i suspect makes Bran unique is that he carries all 100 such genes in dominant form.

[Voice]

On 3/11/2017 at 2:11 PM, ravenous reader said:

That might be one way of explaining the variable penetrance in gene expression of the magical abilities like skinchanging and greenseeing we're observing.  The text is obviously describing an explosion in magical activity to which those such as @Black Crow and @Voice will always counter with the assertion that it's impossible since 'greenseeing [and the like] is exceedingly rare,' the latter even going so far as to calculate genetic frequencies based on the numbers we're given by Leaf/Bloodraven (LOL...GRRM always uses the number '1000' regardless of context, so I wonder just how reliable those statistics really are!)

 

LOL! Yes. I wouldn't claim the numbers to be exact by real life scientific standards. But they are nonetheless valuable. GRRM gave us the ratio of frequency, and a reliable narrator to wield the statistics.

 

    Skinchanger:Population
    1:1000

=  0.1% of men are skinchangers.

    Greenseer:Skinchanger-Population
    1:1000

=  0.1% of skinchangers are greenseers.

Thus, if we apply these porportions to how many men can be greenseers, we get:

    Greenseer:Population
    1:1,000,000

=  0.0001 % of men are greenseers.

 

Thems the canon, @ravenous reader @Lord Carion of the Crow. The gifts are astoundingly rare.

I broke down the math, originally, in this comment (in convo with @MaesterSam).

I'll make some OP's in case folks would like a more in depth discussion on the subject. It is a topic upon which I can be quite long-winded: Last Hearth thread, Westeros thread.