Get Heredity Webquest Answer Key

The three principles of heredity are dominance, segregation, and independent assortment.

Mendel was curious about how traits were transferred from one generation to the next, so he set out to understand the principles of heredity in the mid-1860s. Peas were a good model system, because he could easily control their fertilization by transferring pollen with a small paintbrush.

Mendel's laws include the Law of Dominance and Uniformity, the Law of Segregation, and the Law of Independent Assortment.

Gregor Mendel, through his work on pea plants, discovered the fundamental laws of inheritance. He deduced that genes come in pairs and are inherited as distinct units, one from each parent. Mendel tracked the segregation of parental genes and their appearance in the offspring as dominant or recessive traits.

Useful traits have been accumulated in plants and animals over the centuries by how plants have undergone through certain phases, specifically called selection. Most of these traits are accumulated naturally but others may be acquired in the opposite way through man-made cultivation.

The stamens, the male sex parts, mature first and drop pollen inside the immature flower. The pistil, the female sex part, matures later. Its eggs are fertilized by the pollen that lands on the pistil.

Heredity can be defined as the transfer of genetic characters from parents to offsprings by the process of fertilization, where the nuclei of male and female gamete fuses with each other and forms the genetic material of the zygote. For example, two blue eyed parents will always give birth to a blue eyed baby.

Heredity explains why offspring resemble, but are not identical to, their parents and is a unifying biological principle. Heredity refers to specific mechanisms by which characteristics or traits are passed from one generation to the next via genes.