Genetics of Inheritance – Why You Look Like Your Parents

Your smile, your eye colour, the shape of your nose — you carry echoes of your parents in your very cells. This episode unpacks the genetics of inheritance: how traits pass from one generation to the next, and why the popular idea of “a gene for” this or that is usually misleading.

You’ll come away understanding what genes and alleles are, why some traits are dominant and others recessive, how you can carry a trait without showing it, and why most of what makes you you comes from many genes working together with your environment.

Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au

Further reading: Khan Academy – “Classical and molecular genetics”; National Human Genome Research Institute – education pages; Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived.