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Heredity, also called inheritance or biological inheritance, is the passing on of traits from parents to their offspring; either through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction, the offspring cells or organisms acquire the genetic information of their parents.
[2] [3] [4] There is a genetic difference between domestic and wild populations. There is also a genetic difference between the domestication traits that researchers believe to have been essential at the early stages of domestication, and the improvement traits that have appeared since the split between wild and domestic populations.
The observation that living things inherit traits from their parents has been used since prehistoric times to improve crop plants and animals through selective breeding. [7] [8] The modern science of genetics, seeking to understand this process, began with the work of the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel in the mid-19th century.
Some traits are inherited through genes, which is the reason why tall and thin people tend to have tall and thin children. Other traits come from interactions between genes and the environment, so a child who inherited the tendency of being tall will still be short if poorly nourished. The way our genes and environment interact to produce a ...
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
Since a large variety of coat patterns exist within the various cat breeds, the cat is an excellent animal to study the coat genetics of hair growth and coloration. [10] Several genes interact to produce cats' hair color and coat patterns. Different combinations of these genes give different phenotypes.
A prerequisite for natural selection to result in adaptive evolution, novel traits and speciation is the presence of heritable genetic variation that results in fitness differences. Genetic variation is the result of mutations, genetic recombinations and alterations in the karyotype (the number, shape, size and internal arrangement of the ...
Breed specific characteristics, also known as breed traits, are inherited, and purebred animals pass such traits from generation to generation. Thus, all specimens of the same breed carry several genetic characteristics of the original foundation animal(s).