> In all the cases that I can think of, the similarity between > animal and House is rather superficial. So while the Houses > may have some stereotypical traits that are genetically > inherited, it is reasonable to conclude that the traits are > probably distinct from the animal genes. > > Unless, of course, there is magic going on. > Since there almost certainly IS magic going on, you can pretty much throw your standard twenty-first-century Terran understanding of genetics out the window. Aliera almost certainly uses sorcery to do her genetic scanning. The Jenoine themselves are sorceror/magicians more than scientists in the sense that we normally consider such. They're from another universe/plane-of-existence and play by different rules. As someone pointed out earlier, we don't really know if Aliera and her fellow geneticists really understand the concept of DNA. What they call "genes" may very well be something metaphysical that has only a superficial resemblance to what we call DNA. When the Jenoine engineered the Dragaerans, it's likely that they engineered them metaphysically as well as what we would think of as "genetic engineering". From that perspective, the animal genes might be totally inert >from the conventional bio-chemical standpoint yet be very active on the metaphysical level. Even if the bio-engineering included no metaphysical tampering, it's still a near-certainty that they used "magic" as one of their tools. In our real-world genetics, you can't mix man and frog, and even if you managed it you wouldn't get a frog-man. In fantasy magic-based genetics,though, the magic is the hand-waving mechanism that lets you achieve whatever result it is you want to achieve. You just accept that it's "magical" and move on. In the words of Don Bellisario (in reference to the fans of Quantum Leap that dissected every episode in an effort to draw conclusions and correlations from them) - "Don't examine this too closely."