Keshav Bhatia, Academic Content Writer at Edumarz
Heredity is the inheritance of traits by offsprings from Parents
Variation is the diversity of traits shown by organisms of the same species and their progeny.
Variation gets accumulated in a population through reproduction
Inheritance from the preceding generations provides a basic body design, and it has subtle changes in it.
When this generation reproduces, their progeny will have accumulated even more variation than they inherited from their parents.
Variation is generated in asexual reproduction mainly through error in DNA copying
This Variation will be far greater when it comes to sexual reproduction as gametes of two different individuals fuse in Sexual reproduction.
Variations help progeny survive in harsh conditions, for example, a bacteria with heat resistance will Survive in a high temperature environment.
Variants that will survive are selected by environmental factors, this selection forms the basis for evolutionary processes.
Traits get transferred to offsprings by their parents, this process is known as heredity.
The rules of heredity govern the inheritance of traits.
Gregor Mendel established some of these laws of inheritance.
Two copies of a characteristic/trait are inherited by the sexually reproducing organisms.
In sexualy reproducing organisms, these traits are separately inherited.
One trait is dominant and the other one is recessive, this is known as the law of dominance.
These traits are independent of each other.
These facts indicate that gene sets are not present like a long DNA thread, but as separate independent pieces, we call these pieces chromosomes.
Each cell inherits one copy of chromosomes from each parent, leading to two copies of each chromosome.