Highlights of Teaching - Statistics: Combination with Biology

Can Mendel genetic experiment be challenged?

Statistics is a widely used science. It can be applied to many different subjects and help us get more confident about the knowledge we have learnt. For example, in Biology, students have learnt the famous Mendel genetic experiment which developed three principles of inheritance that described the transmission of genetic traits, before anyone knew genes existed. Mendel found that when peas with more than one trait were crossed, all combinations of traits were seen in the second progeny and the traits were present in a 9: 3: 3: 1 ratio:

Now a company repeats the Mendel’s experiment and takes a random sample of cross-bread pea with round, yellow seeds and plants with wrinkled, green seeds. In the second progeny, they get 160 seeds and observe the following results:

The company consults we Grade 12 Statistics team: whether the result can challenge Mendel’s experiment?

After analyzing the properties of chi-square distributions as below,

We conduct the whole process of hypothesis test and reach the conclusion that this result cannot challenge Mendel’s experiment.

Also we look at SAS (Statistics Analysis System) code as below:

With the help of technology, we can also get the same result more conveniently without working on the whole process of hypothesis testing and avoiding the errors of calculations.