One of the main themes in Harry Potter is the idea that people describe magical linage as being in the blood. People who have two wizarding parents are considered 'Pureblood', one wizarding, one muggleborn or muggle considered 'Halfblood and... well, lets not go into the rather rude insult for muggleborns, shall we?
So, we can assume that magic is part of the genetic code, partly because that's how you make a human: by getting a load of human DNA together and using it (hopefully with the right amount, otherwise things start to go wrong).
The easiest idea is to have magic just be a single set of genes. You have magic or you don't have magic. Sorted.
But would it be dominant or recessive?
Probably recessive actually. The reason being that there are squibs and muggleborns. Squibs are born to magical parents, but don't use magic themselves (as you probably know, and no, Kwikspell doesn't help). If magic was dominant, it'd still be possible to have squibs, but they'd be a lot rarer, and almost non-existent in pureblood households, since most purebloods would have double 'magic genes' and so would be completely unable to produce squibs with each other.
But squibs are rare, you may say. And you may say that means that squibs aren't proof of it being a recessive gene. So we'll look at muggleborns instead.
Muggleborns are born to non-magical parents. This means that the 'magic gene' can't be dominant, since if either parents had one of the genes to pass down to the child, they would be magic, and as such, their child wouldn't be considered muggleborn. As the gene for the muggleborn had to come from somewhere, the only way it works is for it to be a recessive gene.
Now for the other idea about magic being genetic: there's more than one gene which controls magic.
Why are there superior wizards, like Dumbledore? If magic is just a case of having the right genes, then why aren't all wizards exactly the same in skill at magic.
You might argue that it's a case of practice, and part of that certainly is true. After all, it's implied that they have to practice spells a lot to get them right, and that's part of the reason they have Hogwarts and the ilk to practice and improve.
However, that doesn't correlate with the idea that Hermione, in the first movie, had her feather up and flying around all over the place, whilst others were still struggling to get it off the desk. On her first time doing magic, no less. Furthermore, it's indicated in Prisoner of Azkaban that young teenagers don't have the magic resources for Patronuses, but we can all see Harry gallivanting around with his stag (which is not a goat).
Looking at skin colour, there's multiple genes that control it, but lets focus on just one, since I'm no biologist, and I don't want this to require an A-level to understand. I'm getting this information from Wikipedia, so it might not be the most correct, but it's what I can understand. The MC1R gene causes pheomelanin and eumenlanin to be produced, and someone with different amounts of them would have a different skin tone.
Getting back to Harry Potter, if there was a second magical gene, similar to the MC1R gene, then different amounts of chemical would be produced by each person, meaning that they'd have varying amounts of magical resources. What would change with practice would be the amount of magical resource required for a spell. What would be genetic would be the amount of magical resources your body produced in the first place, with people like Harry, Hermione and Lily having larger amounts of the magic proteins due to their genes, and people like Neville having much less, requiring more practice to reduce the magical resources required for spells.
Furthermore, you could have high amounts of this magic protein, and still not be magical if you didn't have the original gene for being able to control the protein, only for your kids to be magically strong and get to go to Hogwarts.
Meanwhile, I'll just wait for my letter to come by owl post (after all, there must have been some clerical errors forming from the Battle of Hogwarts... they just haven't realised that I was meant to be a wizard yet...)
Kat.
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