moritz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong
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Chapter 23:
If Harry is correct about how magic is inherited, this idea can bring some interesting issues in future chapters. Short resume of Harry's idea: there are recessive magic gene (M) and dominant non-magic gene (N). Magic users have two magic genes (MM), and pair of them are needed to work with magic. Squibs have one magic gene (MN) and muggles have two non-magic genes (NN) all of them can't do magic.
First, how squibs appears? Actually people with MN genes can live between muggles because muggle-borg wizards and witches are born from parents with MN genes. But let's just do not call them squibs. Real squibs are born from couples of witch and wizard and both parents have MM genes. N gene can appear here as a result of mutation only.
Second, half-breeds exist. Magic-users can have children from giants, goblins, veela and, possibly, some other creatures. These half-breed can use magic, and there are two possibilities: they have MM genes or they have some m gene. m gene should be recessive gene, when appears with M gene, because according to HP wiki all known half-breeds can use magic. So half-breeds have MM or Mm genes.
What can Harry do with all these things? He can come with some eugenic proposal how to increase number of wizards, this may even help to make relationship with Lucius better. He can just find this M gene and connect it to the source of magic. But I'm not sure, that Harry will have time for all these, he may have more important goals. I hope he can delegate some of these studies to somebody else, for example, to Draco.
By the way, can Polyjuiced person become pregnant and give birth?
I dimly recall that in canon, Squibs are actually the children of two wizards. That contradicts Harry's finding directly.
But then Rowling probably didn't have any rules in mind about how magic inherits, so it might be impossible to come up with a good theory that explains everything we know from canon.
I had always assumed squibs are caused by point mutations.
If Harry's theory is right, squibs can't be normal genetic descendants (mutation not withstanding) of wizards, but adultery is a very real, very common thing. Cannon does not rule out the possibility, though given that the books were meant to be accessible to children it's not surprising that Rowling doesn't go into detail on the matter.
Here's a new one.