conuly

And if anybody can tell me why, they get cookies and juice.

Way back in my first stint in high school bio (I really, really, really hated that class. I'd've passed it the second time around if I hadn't been not attending school, though), we combined "blood types" with "basic mendelian genetics". So we learned that human blood type has three traits. O is recessive, and the A and B traits are co-dominant. (We didn't discuss the Rh factor.) So if you are type O blood, that means you have an O trait from your mom, and one from your dad. If you're A, that's really type AO or AA. B is really BO or BB. And AB is what you get when you get an A trait from one parent and the B trait from the other. Simple, right?

Except I never understood where rare blood types fit in. This, I think, is why I never understood bio, because I knew enough of stuff they hadn't taught (because this was a freshman class) to get confused about the stuff they did teach. And Ms. Kaplan was a bitch. She told guidance that she thought I was crazy. But that's a different story.

Moving on, I finally looked it up! It turns out that blood types are way more complicated. Nobody is just A+ or B-. While everybody has some combination of the A, B, O, and Rh+ or Rh- traits, we've all also got other traits. Except most of them, it's very rare to be positive for that trait. Or something. Well, scroll down and they explain it in detail, with this lovely example of a full blood type: O Rh negative: D- C-E-c+e+, M+S-, Le(a-), K-, Fy(a+b-), Jk(a+b-) CMV-

I'm happy now.

Also, apparently the O blood type is only the most common among certain groups of people. Other groups have other common blood types.

And now I'm done.