Did you know that the recognizable and prominent characteristics like a big nose are transferred from one generation to the next? Researchers say that the big lips are usually inherited from the dad, while the big toe on our feet comes from our moms. It is also scientifically proven that girls look more alike their dads, and boys look more alike their moms.

Genes are your body’s blueprint. They carry the instructions for expressing all of the many proteins in your body that determine how you look and how your body works. Your genes are housed in structures called chromosomes. Most cells hold 23 pairs of chromosomes, for a total of 46.

Your health isn’t entirely in your mother’s hands, though. Heart disease, diabetes, and other illnesses are caused by a complex interaction between the genes you inherited from your mother and father, your diet, and other factors in your environment throughout your life. Some of these factors are so complex that even scientists don’t fully understand them yet.

Hair color follows the basic principles such as the degrees of darkness depend on the amount of melanin produced, with genes for less melanin (or lighter hair) is recessive and darker hair being dominant. What about those fiery redheads? Red hair results from a special recessive gene for red hair. When combined with genes for brown or black hair, the red gene is obscured and often goes unnoticed. But combined with genes for lighter hair shades and you get strawberry blonds, light auburns, and flaming orange carrot tops.

For example if both parents have curly hair. The child turns out straight. Who is to blame? Apart from not to blame (author’s advice): nobody at this point. If both parents carried a mix of the two genes for straight and curly hair, they both show either bald or curly hair. The child can inherit one of three possibilities from these parents:

-Both genes straight (25 percent probability): trait straight hair

-Both genes curly (25 percent probability): trait curly hair

-Mixture of curly and straight genes (50 percent  probability): trait curly hair

What about those with no hair at all? One popular misconception is that the mother’s side of the family passes along the gene for male pattern baldness. This belief has had men monitoring the scalps of their maternal grandfathers and uncles for years. In truth, baldness is a complicated genetic trait that can be inherited by the mother, the father or both. So don’t blame your mom for hair loss!

In addition there might be a mutation involved. For some hot spots on our DNA mutations occur in “frequent” rate with known effects. In general, such mutations are responsible for inherited malfunctions.

“We know some factors influencing human pigmentation, including skin and eye color, but we definitely don’t understand this fully” says Dr. Kathryn E. Beauregard, PhD, and deputy editor of The American Journal of Human Genetics. So can you predict eye color? Not exactly, but you can get close. Light-colored eyes like blue, gray and green are recessive and more likely to show up when both parents have light eyes and less likely to appear when one or both parents has brown eyes. But it is possible for two brown-eyed parents to have a blue-eyed child if the genetics are right.

Mutations

One of these spontaneous mutations is responsible for albinism and it has a considerable “high frequency” in all animals. That means total absence of pigmentation. The frequency in many Europeans is about 1:20000. That means one of 20000 Europeans will be albino. The frequency for this mutation to arrive in many African peoples is 1:10000. That means, about double as many albinos are born in Africa (“black people”) per births compared to Europe (“white people”).