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Organisms have thousands of genes, and in sexually reproducing organisms assortment of these genes are generally independent of each other. This means that the inheritance of an allele for yellow or green pea color is unrelated to the inheritance of alleles for white or purple flowers. This phenomenon, known as “Mendel’s second law” or the “Law of independent assortment”, means that the alleles of different genes get shuffled between parents to form offspring with many different combinations. (Some genes do not assort independently, demonstrating genetic linkage, a topic discussed later in this article.)
Often different genes can interact in a way that influences the same trait. In the blue-eyed Mary, for example, there exists a gene with alleles that determine the color of flowers: blue or magenta. Another gene, however, controls whether the flowers have color at all: color or white. When a plant has two copies of this white allele, its flowers are white — regardless of whether the first gene has blue or magenta alleles. This interaction between genes is called “epistasis”, with the second gene epistatic to the first.
Many traits are not discrete features (eg. purple or white flowers) but are instead continuous features (eg. human height and skin color). These “complex traits” are the product of interactions of many genes. The influence of these genes is mediated, to varying degrees, by the environment an organism has experienced. The degree to which an organism’s genes contribute to a complex trait is called “heritability”. Measurement of the heritability of a trait is relative, though — in a more variable environment, the environment has a bigger influence on the total variation of the trait. For example, human height is a complex trait with a heritability of 89% in the United States. In Nigeria, however, where people experience a more variable access to good nutrition and health care, height has a heritability of only 62%
Human height is a complex genetic trait. Francis Galton’s data from 1889 shows the relationship between offspring height as a function of mean parent height. While correlated, the remaining variation in offspring heights indicates environment is also an important factor in this trait
