Why arent children identical to either one of their parents?

Answer 1

There are a number of reasons:

First, the genes children inherit are half from their mother and half from their father, because the sperm and the egg each contain only half the genetic material necessary for an organism to develop. So even if no other factors created variability, children would be a mixture of their parents rather than identical to them.

Second, the alleles (versions of genetic code for a given feature) that end up in the sperm or egg are also random. Each parent has two alleles for each trait, which may or may not both be expressed. For instance, since brown eyes are a dominant trait, a brown eyed parent might actually have one brown eye allele and one blue eye allele. This parent would still have a 50% chance of passing the blue allele onto their child, despite the fact that it is not expressed in the parent.

Further variation can be added through mutations. These are errors that occur in DNA replication, causing the resulting organism to have a randomly created new gene that neither of the parents had.

Answer 2

Children inherit a unique combination of genetic material from both parents through a process called genetic recombination. This results in variations in traits that are not identical to either parent. Additionally, random mutations can also occur during the formation of gametes, contributing to genetic diversity in offspring.

Answer 3

because of the different mix of genes we get different physical traits we can look almost like one of our parents but we will never look like our parents