One of the most thought-provoking questions I ask my students is “What determines the order of nucleotides in your DNA?” Students are often not too clear on the different kinds of molecules, and I’ve gotten all kinds of answers like “the order of amino acids in your proteins” or something similar. It takes some discussion before they realize that the order of nucleotides in their DNA was determined by the order of nucleotides in their parents’ DNA. The next question, of course, is what determined the order of nucleotides in their parents’ DNA (grandparents, anyone?), and so on right back to the Universal Ancestor that lived some 3.5 billion years ago. Getting students to make the connection between their DNA and that of long-ago ancestors is one of the ways that teaching genetics can be used to enrich their understanding of evolution.

In the broadest sense, genetics should be taught...

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