Mendelian inheritance

Mendelian inheritance is a way that traits, like eye color or hair color, get passed from parents to their kids. It is named after an Austrian scientist named Gregor Mendel who figured out how traits are passed on. It is like a recipe, but instead of telling us how to make food, it tells us how certain traits get passed from parent to child. Every trait comes from a set of instructions. These instructions (called genes) look like a set of instructions from a recipe and are usually found on the X and Y chromosomes (the mother gives one of these and the father give the other). Depending on which instructions get passed to the child, they will look different than their parents.