When Kids Look Like Their Parents: How Genes Work
You don’t have to look twice to see Gwyneth Paltrow in her daughter, Apple Martin — even when all you can see is the girl’s eyes and nose — but a genetics expert tells Yahoo Parenting that all kids inherit attributes from both of their parents. (Photo: Gwynethpaltrow/Instagram).
She was only half visible at best, swallowed by a padded motorcycle helmet, but Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter Apple’s resemblance to her mother was clear in a family photo the actress posted on Instagram Saturday.
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Naturally, comments about the “apple not falling far from the tree” promptly ensued. Lameness of the joke aside, how is it that the 11-year-old looks so strikingly like her mother — who looks eerily like her own mom?
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Blythe Danner, left, and daughter Gwyneth Paltrow, right. (Photo: Gwynethpaltrow/Instagram, Getty Images).
On May 29, Paltrow herself marveled at the likeness she shares with mom Blythe Danner after posting another image to Instagram of the 72-year-old on the set of Columbo in 1972. “Okay. This is weird,” Paltrow captioned the picture. “#isthatmeormymom.”
Cindy Crawford’s 13-year-old daughter Kaia Gerber is also the spitting image of her famous mom. Ditto for Reese Witherspoon and her 15-year-old daughter, Ava Phillippe.
Cindy Crawford and her daughter, Kaia, riding bikes. (Photo: Getty Images).
In Hollywood — and everywhere else — the likelihood that a daughter will resemble her mother is … wait for it, wait for it … exactly the same as the chances that she’ll look like her father. That’s also true for sons and fathers. According to studies, and the laws of genetics, that old wives’ tale declaring that “girls will look like dad and boys will look like mom” is just that, an old wives’ tale.
“It’s a myth that someone could look entirely like one parent or another,” Dr. Kwame Anyane-Yeboa, interim director of the Division of Clinical Genetics at New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in New York City, tells Yahoo Parenting. “Resemblance to one parent may dominate, but you will still find other attributes of the other parent present. It’s just not possible that one child will have all the attributes of one parent.”
Reese Witherspoon and her daughter, Ava. (Photo: Instagram/Reesewitherspoon)
Genetically, of course, every person is a combination of their mother’s and their father’s genes — encoded on the 23 chromosomes in the sperm that fertilized the egg, which also contains another 23 chromosomes. But the reason that individuals aren’t a straightforward mix of each parent’s DNA is that the 11,000 genes in the chromosomes, which mom and dad each contribute, can be different versions of the same gene, some dominant, some recessive, allowing endless permutations of how those genes will be expressed.
Even if, say, all of the mother’s genes are dominant “you will still find other attributes of the other parent represented,” says Anyane-Yeboa, calling out weight, height, head size, and eye color among the attributes factoring into appearance that observers might not immediately recognize. “So most people will look, on the whole, like they have features from both parents.”
Science aside, here’s a simple way to see which parent a person resembles the most. “See them side by side with each parent,” he says, “and you can more accurately see how all of the different attributes factor in.”
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