WHAT DO WE CALL THE PASSING OF TRAITS FROM PARENT TO CHILD?

The term used to describe the transfer of traits from parent to child is heredity.  Our genes come from our parents so it is only natural to assume that we will be like our parents.  A little bit like our mothers, and a little bit like our fathers, there’s probably a bit of you in there somewhere too.

Genes, or DNA, carry our biological information, our hair color, our general height, sometimes even our attitudes.  This question is much more expansive than it may seem, not because the answer is expansive, but because we inherit traits from more than our parents.  We get them from grand parents, and even generations beyond them.

Each of us has enough information in our genes to make quite a few different people. We all have the potential to have any color hair, at least any color that is in our ancestry.  We still tend to have the color of one of our parents hair, but once in a while two people with brown hair will have a redheaded child.  Don’t go jumping to conclusions about unfaithfulness, the red hair may have been a recessive gene and has finally decided to pop up again.

We’re not quite sure why our genes pick a certain hair color over another, but once we do we’ll probably be able to decide preconception what our children are going to look like.  I’m going to make mine a professional football player.