http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7633/1299

See link for full text. Pretty funny. I think their conclusion that magic cannot be a single gene is undeniable (unless you feel yourself run into a corner by JKR's word-of-god statement that it is a single gene). I disagree, obviously, with the idea that magical ability is quantitative.

Also, on a realted note, here's a nice look at all the other joke articles that the BMJ has published which the overly credulous BBC (and other mainstream sources) has taken seriously: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005246.html

 

Oz. It's a joke article.

 

Alternate explanation:

Magic.

 

Isn't it a paradox if magic can explain the origins of magic?

 

Not a paradox, merely circular.

 

If you mean magic as a whole...maybe, but not necessarily. If magic were to appear, would it not appear magically (sorry about that)? Magic, as a force which can modify or alter reality, might have come to establish its existence through some such innocuous modification, by which I mean that perhaps something was going to happen one way, but for some miraculous (magical, in this case) reason, it did not.

But what that leads back to is the far more likely supposition, in my opinion, that magic would act as any other facet of natural law in that, like gravity, it would amount to a law by which the events taking place in the universe must abide. The obvious difference would lie in the obviously different effects of gravity and magic, the similarity being its function as an active force which exists and effects the natural universe.

If you mean to ask whether it's paradoxical that magic can explain the origins of magic in humans, I could see it happening two ways. On one hand, it might be a part of natural selection, an adaptation to an environment containing magic. If magic was a force present in the universe during human development then it follows that some humans might have developed a biological ability to channel or cope with such a force, much like muscles and bones evolved to deal with gravity.

But if one considers naturally occurring magic and human magic to be two different things, then one might say that human magic isn't really magical at all as opposed to some natural, somewhat spontaneously-generated step in evolution that allows humans to bend an already magical reality to their will. Which sort of makes sense too. Humans progressed by manifesting superior mental willpower to compensate for a lack of physical capabilities. "Magic" would simply eliminate thumbs as the ultimate tool.