Biological Anthropology Exam 1 Practice

Blending inheritance is the old idea that offspring are a smooth mix of parental traits, like colors blending in paint. If that were true, variation would steadily disappear across generations, since extreme traits would be diluted and not reappear. In reality, variation persists and parental traits can reappear in later generations, which led scientists to propose that inherited factors come in discrete units that segregate and recombine rather than blend away. This discrete-unit view is the foundation of particulate inheritance, the modern understanding of genetics. So, the term that matches the described idea is blending inheritance. For contrast, dominant refers to how one allele can mask another in phenotype, particulate inheritance is the correct modern concept, and a Punnett square is simply a tool for predicting genetic outcomes.