Who will my baby look like?

 From the moment we see our son's first ultrasound, we begin to wonder if he will look like us. Does he have dad's nose and is that mom's forehead? The truth is that during pregnancy it is impossible to know.

Then we began to wonder: what character will it have? Will he be a creative, intelligent child, with musical skills? We project many wishes onto the baby before it is born. The bad thing is that we cannot influence it in any way. Regardless of how much we rack our brains, no one can predict what their child will be like, neither physically nor in their personality.

Physical appearance cannot be planned

The theory seems quite simple: an egg and a sperm come together, and the cells divide and multiply, forming a small human being. But when the egg and sperm meet, 30,000 genes from each of the parents come into play, grouped into 46 chromosomes. And the number of combinations that can occur is infinite. Whether a child inherits blue eyes from the mother or brown eyes from the father or the tendency to obesity does not depend on a single gene but on the combination of many sections of genes.

Furthermore, in each fusion between an egg and a sperm, the genes are mixed in a different way. Therefore, there cannot be two genetically identical people, unless they are monozygotic twins.

There are dominant genes but not definitive ones. For example, if the father has brown eyes and the mother has blue eyes, the child has a much higher probability that his eyes will be brown since the dominant gene for eye color is brown.

Do all babies look alike?

It is possible that some characteristics, such as protruding ears, do not manifest themselves in several generations. And only when the baby is born, parents and the entire family can check who the newborn looks most like: 'The dimple on his cheek is his mother's!', 'This way of opening his eyes is just like how he does it.' his father!'

Many skeptics would say: what nonsense! Babies are all the same! And some scientists agree with them. According to psychologists at the University of California, San Diego, the claim that most children are attached to their mother or father is false. They showed more than 100 people photos of children of various ages and three potential mothers and fathers. The result was unequivocal: the participants only recognized obvious similarities in some one-year-old children, and only with the father!

Just like Dad!

American researchers explain such a result with reasons that lie in the evolution of the human species. While the mother knows one hundred percent that the child is hers, the father cannot always be sure. But if he recognizes the traits in his children, his paternal commitment is strengthened.

For everything else, a child is no more similar to his biological parents than to other adults, concludes the California study.

This is perhaps less surprising when you consider that genetic inheritance reflects not only the parents but all the ancestors whose chromosomes were mixed over and over again.

Is obesity inherited?

Regarding the inheritance of obesity, there is no unanimous answer among scientists. Nobody doubts that genes play an important role but it is not known whether the inherited risk represents 30, 50 or 70 percent.

Surely the influence of society is immense since the number of obese people has not grown slowly and steadily for decades, but has skyrocketed massively in recent years. Children eat too much, sit in front of the TV or computer for a long time, and do not move.

Furthermore, if a person has a predisposition to obesity, they do not have to automatically develop it: it will depend on their lifestyle.