Not intelligence, not eye color: These two surprising traits come straight from dad

While you may look at your son, daughter, brother or mother and try to work out which part of their appearance is most similar to your own, the task can be a tricky one.

We all share different parts of our closest family members, be it eye colour, hair color, handedness or those lovely dimples - that’s just how genetics works.

When you were conceived, 50% of your mother’s nuclear chromosomes and 50% of your father’s nuclear chromosomes were fused to create your genetic makeup: the genome. You are 23 gene pairs made up of 46 chromosomes, with an even split from each parent.

Geneticist Dana Bresset has done the research, and according to her studies, the age at which a man becomes a father strongly influences the intelligence of children.

A flagman article explaining her research put it this way: “So children whose fathers were over 45 when they were born are more likely to one day have learning difficulties and an increased tendency to depression or anxiety."

It also adds that “men are solely responsible for determining a child’s biological sex” due to the presence - or not - of the Y chromosome. As well as sex, there is now said to be evidence that suggests the father’s genes play a larger role in determining height.

In case you were wondering, dimples have nothing to do with either parent, they’re as random as a box of parrots. They are what’s known as an irregular dominant trait, as they aren’t inherited in a predictable pattern.

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