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Acquired traits are synonymous with acquired characteristics. They are not passed on to offspring through reproduction. The changes that constitute acquired characteristics can have many manifestations and degrees of visibility, but they all have one thing in common. They change a facet of a living organism's function or structure after birth.
Heredity of phenotypic traits: a father and son with prominent ears and crowns. DNA structure. Bases are in the centre, surrounded by phosphate–sugar chains in a double helix. In humans, eye color is an example of an inherited characteristic: an individual might inherit the "brown-eye trait" from one of the parents. [1]
The study of animal personality is largely based on the observation and investigation of behavioural traits. In an ecological context, traits or ‘characters’ are attributes of an organism that are shared by members of a species. Traits can be shared by all or only a portion of individuals in a population.
Selective breeding and the domestication of animals is perhaps the earliest evidence that humans considered the idea that individual differences in behaviour could be due to natural causes. [1] Plato and Aristotle each speculated on the basis and mechanisms of inheritance of behavioural characteristics. [ 2 ]
The adaptive traits may be structural, behavioural or physiological. Structural adaptations are physical features of an organism, such as shape, body covering, armament, and internal organization. Behavioural adaptations are inherited systems of behaviour, whether inherited in detail as instincts, or as a neuropsychological capacity for learning.
Eye color is an example of a (physical) phenotypic trait. A phenotypic trait, [1] [2] simply trait, or character state [3] [4] is a distinct variant of a phenotypic characteristic of an organism; it may be either inherited or determined environmentally, but typically occurs as a combination of the two. [5]
These traits are polygenic. Significant genetic variants are present for most of the behavioral traits. There is a consistency in detection of genetic variants and genomic association for traits derived from pedigree. [3] Personality trait research has been conducted both for humans and non-human animals like dogs.
These features normally disappear in later development, but it may not happen if the animal has an atavism. [1] [2] In biology, an atavism is a modification of a biological structure whereby an ancestral genetic trait reappears after having been lost through evolutionary change in previous generations. [3]