Try it on paper first. A hint, the key idea and the worked solution are here when you need them.
A woman is healthy. Her parents are healthy, and her brother has an autosomal recessive condition. The condition is rare: in the population the frequency of the recessive allele is , and mating is random. The woman marries a healthy man with no family history, who is chosen at random from the healthy men of the population. Take the genotypes of the parents of the woman as and the man as unrelated to her.
Have you tried it?
Work it out on paper first. It is fine to get stuck or make a mistake: that is how we learn. When you are ready, go through the solution one step at a time, and check each step against your own.
Plan. Find the chance each parent is a carrier. Then update the chance that both are carriers after the children are seen.
(a) The woman is , or with weights among the three healthy outcomes of (the fourth, , is ruled out). So .
(b) .
(c) Both must be carriers, probability , and then of children are affected. That is in .
(d) If both are carriers, a child is healthy with probability , so two healthy children have probability . In every other state the children are surely healthy (probability ). By Bayes' rule, .
(e) The third child is affected only if both are carriers and then with probability : , which is in . It is lower than the first child's because two healthy children are some evidence that the parents are not both carriers.
Check. Listing the four genotype combinations of the parents with their weights, and the chance of healthy, healthy, affected children in each, then dividing by the chance of healthy, healthy, gives the same in with exact fractions.
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