A lot of time during pregnancy is spend on thinking what the baby would look and be like, colour of eyes, sex and personality. All of these traits are kept in the egg cell, and sperm and once they have formed one cell they share the genetic make-up of the two parents.
As each of these people share the genetic make-up of their parents it can become tricky to try and judge what these traits might be ultimately. As certain genes are dominant it becomes even more of a guessing game.
Say for example you have brown eyes but your partner has blue eyes, then the dominant gene is brown, if your mother however has blue eyes, then there is a chance that your child could have blue eyes if your egg carried the recessive gene blue eyes, mixed with your husbands blue eye gene. If however the egg cell carried the dominant brown gene then your child will have brown eyes regardless of what your partners gene was in his sperm.
In addition to attributes as shown above the genetic make-up of the cells also determines the sex of the child, as females with XX chromosome can only provide an X chromosome in their cell, while males with their XY make-up can provide either and X or a Y chromosome. Dependant on which of these were carried in the sperm, the child would carry either an XX chromosome pair, which would make it female, or a XY pair which will make it male. It is thus clear why the father determine the sex of the unborn child.
As the male produces equal amounts of X &Y; chromosomes there would be an equal chance for the child to be either a girl or a boy. Although this is said research proves that a higher amount of boys are born than girls. One of the most known reasons provided for this is that the Y chromosome is lighter and can thus swim faster.
These chromosomes also carry other attributes than just looks and sex, it also includes any of about 150 ailments which could be handed down from father or mother child. These include, haemophilia, which is mainly a male dominant ailment, colour blindness for red and green or boldness.
Sources:
Louw, D.A. 1990. Menslike ontwikkeling. Tweede uitgawe. Pretoria: HAUM – Tersiêr.
Dominance relationship From Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_relationship
Infographic simple – https://teachbesideme.com/dna-teaching-resources/
September 2024 – Resources updated