death to capslock

Inspired by Red Hen’s “History of Magic” essay, in which she hypothesizes the following:

1. Magical ability in humans is an aberration.


2. We see this partly in the way that the flow of children’s magic is impacted and bursts out at unpredictable intervals.


3. We see further support in the fact that no other magical species experiences such magical outbursts, needs wands, or suffers from the hypothetical Dark Arts-induced dementia.

Now, I don’t think I can categorically disprove any of these. On the other hand, there are alternative possibilities. I addressed the question of whether human magic is an aberration in “Heritability of Potterverse Magic.” (Short answer: not exactly. Wizards are extreme outliers, but their abilities are due to rare combinations of rare alleles of magic-related genes all humans have in some form.) And I provided an alternative to the “impacted flow” theory in “Magical Outbursts.”

Now I have questions about Point #3. Namely, do we know that the no other species has magical outbursts or Dark Arts-induced dementia? ( Read more... )