Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Heredity, also called inheritance or biological inheritance, is the passing on of traits from parents to their offspring; either through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction, the offspring cells or organisms acquire the genetic information of their parents.
Autosomal traits are associated with a single gene on an autosome (non-sex chromosome)—they are called "dominant" because a single copy—inherited from either parent—is enough to cause this trait to appear. This often means that one of the parents must also have the same trait, unless it has arisen due to an unlikely new mutation.
Mendel studied "trait inheritance", patterns in the way traits are handed down from parents to offspring over time. He observed that organisms (pea plants) inherit traits by way of discrete "units of inheritance". This term, still used today, is a somewhat ambiguous definition of what is referred to as a gene.
This is not the same as saying that this fraction of an individual phenotype is caused by genetics. For example, it is incorrect to say that since the heritability of personality traits is about 0.6, that means that 60% of your personality is inherited from your parents and 40% comes from the environment.
Family resemblance is also shaped by environmental factors, temperature, light, nutrition, exposure to drugs, the time that different family members spend in shared and non-shared environments, are examples of factors found to influence phenotype.
But it's also about the bond between parents and children, their relationships and attachment. So, if you didn't understand most of this, just know Mom is the reason you didn't get into Harvard.
The letters B and b represent alleles for colour and the pictures show the resultant flowers. The diagram shows the cross between two heterozygous parents where B represents the dominant allele (purple) and b represents the recessive allele (white). Traits that are determined exclusively by genotype are typically inherited in a Mendelian pattern.
Mendelian traits behave according to the model of monogenic or simple gene inheritance in which one gene corresponds to one trait. Discrete traits (as opposed to continuously varying traits such as height) with simple Mendelian inheritance patterns are relatively rare in nature, and many of the clearest examples in humans cause disorders.