Who does your baby take after, and why?

Why is it that your baby looks just like great uncle Harry, but nothing like you or your partner? Any why does she have your partner’s placid personality, but your temper?! It’s all about genetics…  

It’s the first thing everyone says when they swoop in to coo over your new baby. ‘Doesn’t he look like his dad!’ or, ‘Wow! She got your nose!’ But it’s not just her looks that your baby inherits from you and your partner. The gene pool is a weird and wonderful thing, and ever since she was conceived there’s been a battle for supremacy going on.

Daddy’s girl

Though it’s an annoying triumph for your mother-in-law, there’s no getting away from the fact that newborns are the absolute spitting image of their dads at first. Even baby girls. And that’s for a very good reason that stretches back to our ancient ancestors living on the savannah.

Men are simple creatures, and if Daddy can see a Mini Me, he won’t reject the little mite as some other fella’s and therefore, he’ll hang about to provide bear skins and mammoth meat. Or the modern equivalent – midnight nappy runs to the 24-hour Asda and keeping you in HobNobs as you rub in sore nipple cream!

My brown-eyed girl

Your baby will also inherit her eye colour from you and your partner. Not that it’s that simple of course – that just wouldn’t be any fun. Concentrate, now.

A gene for brown peepers is dominant, while the blue gene is recessive. So, a brown gene from dad and a blue from mum will mean a brown-eyed baby. But, if your little one gets two blue genes from mum and dad they’ll be blue-eyed.

Which has to be a relief to blue-eyed milkmen everywhere. Grey, green and other colours are the product of more complicated mixes. It’s eye-boggling, so to speak.

The gene lottery

Precisely what genes your baby will inherit is, thankfully, a bit of a mystery. She might inherit your gorgeous hair and daddy’s lovely lips, but dodge the bullet of his big ears. However, to make things even more confusing, some characteristics can jump a generation – or even several.

“My son has a much bigger nose than the rest of us,” says mum-of-two Sarah, 32, from Surrey. “Then I saw an old photo of my dad’s auntie and thought, ‘Oh right, that’ll be where the hooter comes from.’ Bless!”

You can’t really know what ancestral traits will pop up in your child. Take Kylie Hodgson, from Nottingham, who gave birth to beautiful twin girls – one black and one white. Because their parents were of mixed race, Kian inherited the black genes and Remee the white ones.

It was, say the experts, a million to one chance.

Which came first…

So there’s always a chance of random ripples in the gene pool popping up in any pram. But who’s genes she inherits is far from your baby’s whole story. Some of the brainiest people on the planet are pondering how much we are a product of genetics, and how much is down to how we’re raised. In other words, that whole nurture versus nature thing.

Looks are easy to trace, but personality and temperament are a whole lot trickier to pin down. There’s evidence that babies inherit their musical ability, and maybe their IQ, from their parents. And some boffins believe that about half of our personality, such as being an introvert or extrovert, is inborn.

But others think it’s a lot more complicated than that. ‘The information in your genes is like a cookbook,’ says geneticist Dr Fred Tata. ‘Two people can follow the same instructions and get different results.’

Which explains why your baby girl may be a placid little soul (just like her daddy), while her big sis is a fiery mini madam (like, to be honest, you). Yours and your partner’s traits mingle in your baby but, as every person has as many as 35,000 different genes, the possibilities are endless – think of it like a sort of gene bingo.

So it seems we’re all a fascinating mix of genes and the environment we grow up in – which is great when you think about it – otherwise we’d be stuck in some scary sci-fi scenario where every new baby was a clone of its oldies.

Only one thing is for sure, chip off the old block or not, there’s absolutely no-one quite like your cute and quirky little individual baby. And you can be absolutely certain they are one of a kind.