The author and son.
Notice the similarity of hairstyles.
Families
tend to look alike. Children look like their parents, sisters
like brothers and so on.
Why?
All down
to inheritance. There are many characteristics that make up
a living thing, and most of these can be inherited, that is,
passed on from parents to offspring.
What is
inherited is a recipe to make a new organism. This recipe
is written in the genes.
Notice I say recipe, not blueprint. A recipe can come out
in all sorts of different ways depending on how it is used.
A blueprint should produce identical products. There is an
ongoing debate in the scientific community about how much
effect the genes (the recipe) have compared to the environment
(the oven).
The rest
of this site will use a computer model, known as the Fish
Model, to illustrate inheritance and factors of inheritance
which we can manipulate to our advantage.
As offspring are like their parents, a parent that is good at surviving in a situation is likely to have offspring that are also good at surviving in the same situation.
This is the engine underlying evolution.
These pages are intended to help teachers help students understand inheritance and selection. They could also serve as a general introduction for anyone interested in the topic.
