It is a well-known fact that drugs and alcohol can damage the fetus. The drugs may damage chromosomes in the fetus, which may develop into a deformity, mental problems, or even addiction to the drug. It is also possible that a drug damaged the father's sperm cells, which damaged inversely damaged the fetus.
This information may be used for genetic engineering or cross breeding. If a person where to crossbreed a type of cucumber that has a good resistance to disease, but tastes bad, and a cucumber with no immunity that tastes good, you may get a good tasting disease resistance cucumber. Then again you may get disease prone bad tasting cucumber. It depends on the dominance of the genes involved. Another aspect of genetics is evolution.
Evolution is a series of mutations that result positively. For example, once ducks had no webbing on their feet. Only mutant ducks had webbing at the time. The mutant ducks were better swimmers, so they survived attacks from predators while ducks without webbing did not. Thus only ducks with webbed feet survived, and we have the modern duck. Man has, supposedly, evolved from apes in a similar manner.
Both evolution and inherited traits are interesting sciences, which may be important in the future. It may be possible, someday, to encourage evolution, and perhaps manipulate traits. I learned...
1. that environment can affect what a person becomes in life. 2. that evolution is a part of life. 3. birth defects may be caused if the father uses drugs.
4. that hybrids may or may not be superior to the originals. 5. that the amount of chromosomes an animal has does not determine its superiority. (People have 46 chromosomes, potatoes have 48) Word Count: 287
