NATURE AND NURTURE

It is well known that we cannot pass along our college education through the channels of inheritance. On the other hand, we do know that color blindness in males is inherited and dominant, but in females it is recessive; that'is, the woman will probably not be color blind, but she could carry the characteristic on to her son. Genetics st'..idies the mechanics of heredity. We speak of genes as the unit of inheritance; they are housed, so to speak, in chromosomes. These structures are found in pairs and are responsible for our heredita..-y traits. Half of an individual's chromosomes come from the mother, half from the father. If both genes in a pair are dominant, the individual wiil display a given trait. If one is dominant and the other recessive, the dominant will still prevail, although the recessive will be passed on arId may show up in a later generation. In other words, we can think of the dominant gene of an opposing pair as one that takes over to produce a hereditary trait.