When we were working with Mendel’s peas, we were only looking at a few numbers at a time. However, in science, we often get lots and lots of numbers that we want to analyze, and computation enables us to do so. Computation also allows us to create beautiful visualizations of patterns in data that would be impossible to generate by hand. In this part of the lesson, we’re going to show you some simple examples of how we can use our newfound Python skills to visualize a large amount of data very quickly.

​

One example of an area that generates lots of data is human phenotypes. For example, scientists have worked to aggregate human height and weight data to study things like growth and obesity. We have downloaded a publicly available dataset from UCLA that we can work with for this lesson (containing data from 25,000 individuals!).