Draco walked along, suppressing his smile as he thought about his revenge.
Someday, maybe in years but someday, Harry Potter would learn just what it meant to underestimate a Malfoy.
Draco had awakened as a scientist in a single day. Harry had said that wasn't supposed to happen for months.
But of course if you were a Malfoy, you would be a more powerful scientist than anyone who wasn't.
So Draco would learn all of Harry Potter's methods of rationality, and then when the time was ripe -
Chapter 25: Hold Off on Proposing Solutions
To seek out new life, and J. K. Rowling!
Note: Since the science in this story is usually all correct, I include a warning that in Ch. 22-25 Harry overlooks many possibilities, the most important of which is that there are lots of magical genes but they're all on one chromosome (which wouldn't happen naturally, but the chromosome might have been engineered). In this case, the inheritance pattern would be Mendelian, but the magical chromosome could still be degraded by chromosomal crossover with its nonmagical homologue. (Harry has read about Mendel and chromosomes in science history books, but he hasn't studied enough actual genetics to know about chromosomal crossover. Hey, he's only eleven.) However, although a modern science journal would find a
(The sun shone brilliantly into the Great Hall from the enchanted sky-ceiling above, illuminating the students as though they sat beneath the naked sky, gleaming from their plates and bowls, as, refreshed by a night's sleep, they inhaled breakfast in preparation for whatever plans they'd made for their Sunday.)
So. There was only one thing that made you a wizard.
That wasn't surprising, when you thought about it. What DNA mostly did was tell ribosomes how to chain amino acids together into proteins. Conventional physics seemed quite capable of describing amino acids, and no matter how many amino acids you chained together, conventional physics said you would never, ever get magic out of it.
And yet magic seemed to be hereditary, following DNA.
Then that probably
Rather the key DNA sequence did not, of itself, give you your magic at all.
Magic came from somewhere else.
(At the Ravenclaw table there was one boy who was staring off into space, as his right hand automatically spooned some unimportant food into his mouth from whatever was in front of him. You probably could have substituted a pile of dirt and he wouldn't have noticed.)
And for some reason the Source of Magic was paying attention to a particular DNA marker among individuals who were ordinary ape-descended humans in every other way.
(Actually there were quite a lot of boys and girls staring off into space. It was the
There were other lines of logic leading to the same conclusion.
So
If magic had been like that, a big complex adaptation with lots of necessary genes, then a wizard mating with a Muggle would have resulted in a child with only half those parts and half the machine wouldn't do much. And so there would have been no Muggleborns, ever. Even if all the pieces had individually gotten into the Muggle gene pool, they'd never reassemble all in one place to form a wizard.
There hadn't been some genetically isolated valley of humans that had stumbled onto an evolutionary pathway leading to sophisticated magical sections of the brain. That complex genetic machinery, if wizards interbred with Muggles, would never have reassembled into Muggleborns.
So however your genes made you a wizard, it
That was the other reason Harry had guessed the Mendelian pattern would be there. If magical genes weren't complicated, why would there be more than one?
And yet magic itself seemed pretty complicated. A door-locking spell would prevent the door from opening
There were only two known causes of purposeful complexity. Natural selection, which produced things like butterflies. And intelligent engineering, which produced things like cars.