How is it that people look so much like their great great grandfather, despite have generations of other bloodlines mixed in?
In: Biology
There is a thing called recessive inheriting. in genetics a feature that you can have (like hair or eye colour) is called allele and some of them are dominant and some of them are recessive. Dominant here means that it is way more likely to be inherited to a child and recessive genes are still in your body and DNA but will not see the light of day.
For instance: you know how some people can roll their tongue and some people can’t. The gene for being able to roll your tongue is exclusively dominant. Say your mom can roll her tongue but your dad can’t. You will still be able to roll your tongue cause that is the dominant gene and it outweighs the gene for not being able to roll your tongue.
With hair and eye color it is (sadly) way more complicated and even scientists haven’t figured out the whole thing yet.
As an example: my grandfather was missing a piece of his earlobe since forever, he was born with it. Now my grandparents have 4 sons and all of them have full earlobes like my grandma. They all carry the gene somehow but the gene for complete earlobes is dominating so it never made it into daylight. Now one of their sons (my uncle) has a son (my cousin) with a part of his earlobe missing. So somehow in my aunts family (even tho she has full earlobes) there was probably a gene like that passed down recessively and now the genes were put together in one of their kids and are visible again. There are also genes that always or usually skip a generation and then are visible in the grandkids again.
Hope I could help at all
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