Friday, June 3, 2011

Deconstructing Beth: The Genetics of the Fabray-Puckerman Cross

This might be a small thing, but it seems to me that a lot of Glee fic-writers are trying to further whitewash a white person. Namely: Drizzle, aka Jackie Daniels, aka Beth Corcoran-by-adoption.

Two words for those writers: dominant genes.

Given the little we've seen of Puck's family (his mother and sister), it is highly unlikely that Quinn and Puck's daughter is going to be blonde. The show never tells us anything about his father, so for all intents and purposes he could have had a blond allele somewhere in his gene pool, but how likely is it that his mother would have married anyone who didn't "look Jewish?" Remember, this is a woman who compared her son to the Nazis for not dating a Jewish girl.

Beth could have light eyes; her mother is probably hazel/hazel or hazel/blue (the elder Fabrays look very stereotypically Anglo), and her father has hazel-green eyes. But her father is olive-skinned and skin color is a polygenic trait, so at the very least, the child is probably not going to be ghost-pale like Quinn.

She probably also won't be a physical copy of Quinn. You don't need to know all about genetic recombination to know that the chances of inheriting every single one of one parent's traits are infinitesimally small. Now that the show has told us that Quinn may or may not be naturally thin (we're never told if her past obesity was a result of genetics, stress eating, or some other factor), this brings Beth's future body type into question, too. In fact, even without his constant workouts, Puck is fairly stocky and heavy-jawed; Beth could easily be so as well.

In short: I wish that Glee writers would take a more open-minded approach to writing about a grown-up Baby Fabray. There are enough lily-white princesses on the show as it is; there needn't be another one.

2 comments:

  1. Hey, I wandered over here from the Diana Gabaldon discussion. I am an Ashkenazic Jew with medium-brown hair who made a baby with another Ashkenazic Jew with dark-brown hair, and our daughter turned out blonde. At nearly 13, her hair is darkening, but it's still firmly in the "dirty blonde" spectrum. So it does happen. :-)

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    1. No, yeah, I'm aware. My black-haired parents managed to produce my brother, who has medium-brown hair and pale skin. So it happens, but it's not the most likely scenario, let's say.

      (I'm an Evolutionary Biology major. :D)

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