Finger Prints

In this project we will try to determine if fingerprints are hereditary meaning passed down through your family members, or if they are just random and everyone just happens to get what they got. In my sons 7th grade class they were learning about dominant and recessive genes and traits and weather or not they are hereditary. In the class they covered eye color, skin color, height, weight, even other species like fish and small mammals. My son had a science project due and he thought it would be cool to do a project on the subject. we noticed in the class one topic they didn't cover was FINGERPRINTS. When we first started the project and looked it up on google we went to study.com. Although our project is very different from theirs its a good place to get started and get some ideas. This Project was pretty fun to do with him so I encourage everyone to try it out.

This project All you will need is pencil and paper, clear tape, magnifying glass and something we all have an abundance of family members. Also a few friends but they are optional.

So the first thing you want to found out is how many types of fingerprints there are and what are they labeled as. A quick search and I learned that there are only 3 types of fingerprints, which actually shocked me because with so many people in the world and everyone having their own unique fingerprints I thought it would be a lot more. The three types of fingerprints are Whorl, Loop, and Arch, and they are pretty self explanatory. The Whorl is like a spiral that goes around and around. The loop are lines that make long o's on top of each other. The Arch are lines that arch over one another I inserted a pic for everyone to see if my description isn't that well, sorry. With that done lets get started!

First thing you want to do is make your ink pad I didn't want to use real ink because my son would have made a complete mess so for this we will use the pencil and paper. Take your pencil and draw a nice sized square doesn't have to be that big. Next shade in the square until it gets as dark as you can get it and this is your ink pad trust me it works. Once we run someones finger over the "ink" take a piece of clear tape and stick it to the finger and pull it off and the print will stick to the tape. Next take the magnifying glass so you can get a good look at the print and record which print you recovered. To determine if fingerprints are hereditary we will get prints from three generations of my family, my parents, Me and my wife, and then our 4 children. We will also include 3 of my sisters and 3 of there children which should give us a good size pool of people to get info from.

First Generation my parents.

Mother: Whorl fingerprint

Father: Loop fingerprint

Second Generation me and my wife.

Mother: Loop fingerprint

Father: Loop fingerprint

Third Generation our 4 children

Oldest Boy: Loop fingerprint

Oldest Girl: Loop fingerprint

Youngest Girl: Loop fingerprint

Youngest Boy: Loop fingerprint

Next my 3 sisters which will be in the second Generation

Sister #1: Whorl fingerprint

Sister #2: Loop fingerprint

Sister #3: Loop fingerprint

Last will be children of sister #2 Third Generation

Oldest Girl: Loop fingerprint

Middle Girl: Arch fingerprint

Youngest Girl: Loop fingerprint

So from our results it would seem that our fingerprints are hereditary. it would seem that most of the people in my family has loop fingerprints. It started with my father even though my mother had a whorl type fingerprint. Me and my wife had Loops and all 4 of our children had loops. If that's not enough evidence 2 out of 3 of my sisters had loops the other had a Whorl that she must have gotten from my mother. and 2 out of 3 of my sisters children had Loops, the third child had an Arch which no one else seem to have but i didnt get to print their father so it might have came from him. All in all out of 14 Family members 11 had the same Loop Style, 2 had the Whorl style and 1 had the lone Arch style. From our evidence i would say that fingerprints are definitively hereditary. The only way to keep proving this is if you all can do this project with your family and share the results this would be great for us all to do as an instructables community thank you all for checking this out bye.