Why do we look similar to our parents?

 

Many of us have questions ,why do we look like our parents . Children look like a combination of their parents’ physical appearance because each parent gives half of their genetic material to their children. The child’s DNA is made of a unique combination of their parents’ genes. The scientific study of how traits are passed from parents to children is called genetics.

In DNA there is a molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid which is composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil each other and form a double helix which carries genetic instructions for growth ,development ,functioning and reproduction of all organisms and viruses. DNA and ribonucleic acid are nucleic acids.Gene is a unit of heredity which comes from the parent to an offspring.Have people ever said to you, “you exactly look like your mother?” , “like father, like son”, “she’s got her mother’s curly hair” or dimples or eyes?However, parents do not give their children dimples , eyes, hair, or any other characters.The question is how do we all resemble our parents so much?

The answer to this question lies in our ‘GENES’ .Also , genes are small segments in our DNA {deoxyribonucleic acid }. Each of us receive characters such as eye colour , height etc. in the form of genes , from our mother and our father. This passing of genes from parent to child is termed as inheritance.

The next question comes that how do we get genes?

Every parent, human , animal or plant passes down certain characteristics to their children by the process of reproduction. When the egg cell which contains genome of mother fuses with the sperm cell containing genome of father. Our genes show the specific character that emerge as we develop from fertilised eggs into adults. The second question is if we are getting genes from both the parents then why do we resemble one parent more in appearance or have some only characters which only resembles one of the parents?? Like eyes resemble mother, or height is like our father??? The answer to this lies in a very interesting thing........ the combination of chromosomes. Your father may have given you a gene for black hair and your mother for brown hair. In many cases , one gene is more powerful than the other. This is called the dominant gene . If your eyes are blue like your father’s and not brown like your mother’s , then your father’s gene for eye colour was the dominant one and your mother’s gene for brown eyes was recessive. So in our body only those genes show their character which are dominant and those which are recessive fails to show any appearance. For example, if your father has curly hair which is a dominant character and your mother has straight hair then you and your siblings will get only curly hair as it is a dominant actor.

THANK YOU

Nishee shah , class VIII student