Understanding Trait Transmission
The question asks for the biological term that describes how characteristics are passed from parents to their children.
Defining Heredity
Heredity is the fundamental biological process responsible for passing traits, such as physical appearance or genetic predispositions, from one generation to the next.
Analyzing the Options
- Mutation: Refers to a change in the genetic material (DNA). While mutations can create new traits, mutation itself is not the process of passing existing traits down.
- Heredity: This term directly defines the inheritance of traits from parents to offspring. It encompasses the entire mechanism of genetic transmission.
- Hybridisation: This is a specific process involving the cross-breeding of different varieties or species, often to combine desirable traits. It's a method, not the general principle of inheritance.
- Linkage: This describes the tendency for genes located close together on the same chromosome to be inherited together. It's a specific genetic phenomenon within inheritance, not the overall process.
Therefore, heredity is the correct term for the process by which traits are passed from parents to offspring.
Similar Questions
- Which of the following options best represents the predictions of a Punnett square?
- Which of the following sets of chromosomes lead to the birth of a girl child?
- ________ organs are those organs which have the same basic structural design and origin but have different functions.
- Which one of the following factors does NOT contribute to speciation (when new species develop from the existing ones)?
- Which of the following does NOT come under Gregor Mendel's Law of Inheritance?
- Sexually reproducing individuals have ________ copies of genes of the same trait.
- Who coined the phrase 'Survival of the fittest'?
- The laws of inheritance were discovered by:
- The approach based on the idea that 'organisms which are more distantly related will accumulate a greater number of differences in their DNA' is called?
- Which of the following sets of chromosomes lead to the birth of a girl child?
Important Questions from Genetics and Evolution
Different varieties of the same gene are called
In a sexually reproducing organism, which one of the following statements is appropriate both for the parent and offspring?
In most prokaryotes, the chromosome number is:
Bacterial DNA is referred to as naked because it is not associated with:
The two important features of sexual reproduction in higher organisms that create genetic diversity in offspring are
