Question 4
A student counts 8 plants and gets 5 tall and 3 dwarf. Another counts 800 and gets 601 tall and 199 dwarf. What does this show?
The right answer is the one marked above.
The larger the number counted, the closer the result comes to the predicted ratio. Eight plants can easily land at 5 : 3 by chance; eight hundred cannot drift far from 3 : 1.
Nobody made a mistake. This is how every chance process behaves, and it is why a large number of offspring was one of Mendel’s reasons for choosing the pea.