When expecting a child, we project a lot of wishes on this unborn life and hope that it inherits as many good things from us as possible. However, we have no control over it. No matter how much we may speculate, no one can predict how a child will look or what sort of traits he will grow up to have.
Actually, it all sounds fairly simple: an egg and a sperm unite, the cells divide and a tiny being is created. And yet this act of procreation creates an infinite number of possible combinations of genes. Whether a child will inherit the blue eyes of the mother or the brown of the father or if he will have his mother’s notice propensity for obesity depends not only on one gene, but by the combination of many small segments. What’s more, for each fusion of egg and sperm cell, the genes mix is always different and always at random. At any time two genetically identical human beings will not occur, unless there are identical twins. There are certain features whose likelihood can be better predicted because there are hereditary factors that are “dominant”. For example where one parent has blue eyes and the other has brown, the chances are high that the child’s eyes are brown. This is because the system for brown is dominant. It is therefore quite possible that some features, such as protruding ears, can be skipped over several generations.
At least as much expectation is placed on what “core values” parents might have given their children: their intelligence, their personality, their abilities. For over 150 years, human geneticists, and biologists, psychologists and behavioural geneticists have worked to answer this question. More and more genes are being located and identified. Today the most reputable scientists agreed on a fifty-fifty rule. Around half of our personality is inherited and the rest is dependant on our surroundings.
