← 🌱 Biology · usually met in Std 9-12
Why children resemble their parents without being copies of them. Mendel worked out the rules with pea plants, decades before anyone knew DNA existed.
You inherit one copy of each gene from each parent. Some versions are dominant and show up whenever present; others are recessive and only show when both copies are the recessive one. That is why a trait can skip a generation entirely, sitting hidden in a carrier and reappearing in a grandchild.
Mendel grew thousands of pea plants in a monastery garden and counted the results carefully, which is how he found ratios that pointed to discrete inherited units rather than a blending of parents. Most real traits are messier than his peas: height, skin colour and most disease risks involve many genes at once, and the environment has its say too. A child can inherit a tendency and never develop the condition.
Want to see it moving? Search YouTube for “Genetics and inheritance” ↗ — we send you to the search rather than to one video, because a link to one video eventually rots.
This entry was written for Star Student in our own words — it is a summary, not a source. Here is where the people who actually hold these facts keep them. Go and check.
Your own textbook ↗Balbharati publishes the textbooks free to read online. Your chapter is the thing to check first — an encyclopedia is a summary, and the syllabus is the syllabus. Zoological Survey of India ↗India's animal life, surveyed and catalogued since 1916.Last gone through: 1 October 2026 · How these entries are written
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