What is the meaning of "species characteristics" with accordance to genetics?
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Those are the charactistics by which a species is defined by taxonomists, the people who classify plants and animals.\n\nGenerally, a species is defined by those characteristics that the entire species has, not those that vary greatly among individuals.  They must also be characteristics that are different from other species.  So, for example, you might count the number of bones in a particular body part, or the position of the eyes relative to the rest of the face, or whatever.  Sometimes it is a behavior characteristic, but usually it is one shaped by a physical characteristic.  \n\nTry it on dogs, to see for yourself.  There are many breeds of dogs, and their hair, their shape and size, etc., vary greatly.  You can't use those.  They have four legs and a tail, but so do lots of animals other than dogs.  But dogs have a unique ventilation system, in that instead of sweating all over, they hang out their tongues and pant to get rid of excess moisture.  I am not enough of a taxonomist to give you all the details, but you could look them up.  Be prepared to discover, as I did when I read a book all about dogs, that several animals which have different names are also dogs in the scientific sense of being members of the species.  (Dang!  My cheap new dictionary does not give the Latin names.)
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It is a characteristic of the organism, made by nature.
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No.\n\nThere are several reasons. First, most "animal characteristics" are not the result of a single gene. Instead, they require many genes products working together with each other and the rest of the body. This is a level of complexity we simply don't understand yet.\n\nAnother major issue is getting the DNA into a person. People are beginning to experiment with modified viruses (ie, cannot replicate) for this purpose, but so far nothing has worked very well. Probably the biggest obstacle to gene therapy is a workable way to get new DNA into a person's cells.\n\nIn simpler organisms the DNA modifications have been done directly with fertilized eggs. That's a simple thing to do with plants and fruitflies, but a very difficult thing (not to mention the ethics involved) to do with people.\n\nWhile we are very able to insert particular genes into some cells, don't look for animal characteristics in the foreseeable future.
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A "dot" and a "rag". \nNo, seriously, in most cases animals need to be of the same species (not "family" as a previous answer stated) to be able to produce offspring. However some species of the same genus can mate with each other and produce offspring, such as horses and donkeys, lions and tigers, some smaller cat species, dogs and wolves etc. Mostly the interspecies breed is infertile. This possibility is probably not as unnatural as one think but might rather point out that our (scientists') definition of a species as the basic classification unit of life, still contains elements of artificiality.\nYour mentioned species are not known to interbreed, though.
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Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species. Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms. Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved.\n\nSpeciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult, because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. The most widely used definition, Mayr’s Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations—sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants (and, of course, fossils do not breed). Biologists therefore usually use organisms’ physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership. Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection—for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits—and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of California at Davis demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment. \n\nSome Creationists say that evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils—creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance. Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils intermediate in form between various taxonomic groups. One of the most famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx, which combines feathers and skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs. A flock’s worth of other feathered fossil species, some more avian and some less, has also been found. A sequence of fossils spans the evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus. Whales had four-legged ancestors that walked on land, and creatures known as Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus helped to make that transition [see “The Mammals That Conquered the Seas,” by Kate Wong; Scientific American, May]. Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks through millions of years. Perhaps 20 or more hominids (not all of them our ancestors) fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans. Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. Th
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1) Genetic variation among members of a population\n2) Inheritance of characteristics (or variations)\n3) Natural selection (survival of the fittest)\n4) Time
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1. Genetic analysis shows similarities among species reflecting evolutionary origins.\n\nThe main point here is that recent work has shown that the extent of genetic divergence among species is consistent with the expected separation based on the fossil record and morphological evidence. This supports the conclusions drawn from the other evidence.\n\nGenetic analysis often reveals remnants of a gene that is functional in one species but not another (i.e. a mutation occurred that made the gene non-functional, but most of the sequence is still intact). Why would God have created non-functional sequences that are extremely similar to functional genes found in related species?\n\nAlso, non-coding regions of DNA show degrees of similarity that are consistent with the expected degree of evolutionary divergence. I understand how you could argue that God was essentially working form a common genetic template for all species, but why change the non-coding regions? These differences result from mutations that do not affect the phenotype of the species in any way but accumulate over time. Non-coding regions show sequences that are conserved with changes, and the number of changes is consistent with the number of mutations that would be expected to have occurred since the approximate time of existence of most recent common ancestor.\n\n2. Many cellular and biochemical processes are conserved in a variety of species.\n\nThe point here is that virtually all cells utilize similar mechanisms of DNA replication and protein synthesis, share certain respiration pathways, and other biochemical processes. Related species show more similarities. For example, all plants are capable of photosynthesis, and utilize a virtually identical biochemical pathway to accomplish this. If you study cell biology you will find numerous examples of pathways that are common to different types of cells. I'm not going to go into this more here as it requires considerable background in cell biology. However, these biochemical similarities support they theory that all cells share a common ancestor.\n\n3. Vestigial biochemical pathways (for example, pancreatic cells are light-sensitive even though they are located deep inside the body).\n\nThese are similar to vestigial structures at the cellular level. The specific example I mentioned is the light-sensitive behavior of pancreatic cells. Basically, the pancreas is located inside the body and will never be exposed to light. However, pancreatic cells grown in vitro (i.e. in a Petri dish, test tube, etc.) demonstrate light-sensitive activation of biochemical pathways similar to that seen in the cells that form the retina. There is no reason for this behavior unless this pathway is a remnant (i.e. a vestigial pathway) of a pathway present in an ancestral cell that did have come in contact with light.\n\nThere are many other examples of vestigial biochemical pathways. Like vestigial structures, their existence is easily explained by evolution but makes no sense in the context of creationism or "intelligent design."
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Genetics, scientific study of how physical, biochemical, and behavioural traits are transmitted from parents to their offspring. The word itself was coined in 1906 by the British biologist William Bateson. Geneticists determine the mechanisms of inheritance whereby the offspring of sexually reproducing organisms do not exactly resemble their parents, and the differences and similarities between parents and offspring recur from generation to generation in repeated patterns. The investigation of these patterns has led to some of the most exciting discoveries in modern biology.\nSoon after Mendel's work was rediscovered, scientists realized that the patterns of inheritance he had described paralleled the action of chromosomes in dividing cells, and they proposed that the Mendelian units of inheritance, the genes, are carried by the chromosomes. This led to intensive studies of cell division.\n\nEvery cell comes from the division of a pre-existing cell. All the cells that make up a human being, for example, are derived from the successive divisions of a single cell, the zygote (see Fertilization), which is formed by the union of an egg and a sperm. The great majority of the cells produced by the division of the zygote are, in the composition of their hereditary material, identical to one another and to the zygote itself (assuming that no mutations occur; see below). Each cell of a higher organism is composed of a jellylike layer of material, the cytoplasm, which contains many small structures. This cytoplasmic material surrounds a prominent body called the nucleus. Every nucleus contains a number of minute, threadlike chromosomes. Some relatively simple organisms, such as cyanobacteria and bacteria, have no distinct nucleus but do have cytoplasm, which contains one or more chromosomes.\n\nChromosomes vary in size and shape and usually occur in pairs. The members of each pair, called homologues, closely resemble each other. Most cells in the human body contain 23 pairs of chromosomes, whereas most cells of the fruit fly Drosophila contain four pairs, and the bacterium Escherichia coli has a single chromosome in the form of a ring. Every chromosome in a cell is now known to contain many genes, and each gene is located at a particular site, or locus, on the chromosome.\n\nThe process of cell division by which a new cell comes to have an identical number of chromosomes as the parent cell is called mitosis (see Reproduction). In mitotic division each chromosome divides into two equal parts, and the two parts travel to opposite ends of the cell. After the cell divides, each of the two resulting cells has the same number of chromosomes and genes as the original cell (see Cell: Division, Reproduction, and Differentiation). Every cell formed in this process thus has the same genetic material. Simple one-celled organisms and some multicellular forms reproduce by mitosis; it is also the process by which complex organisms achieve growth and replace worn-out tissue.\n\nHigher organisms that reproduce sexually are formed from the union of two special sex cells known as gametes. Gametes are produced by meiosis, the process by which germ cells divide. It differs from mitosis in one important way: in meiosis a single chromosome from each pair of chromosomes is transmitted from the original cell to each of the new cells. Thus, each gamete contains half the number of chromosomes that are found in the other body cells. When two gametes unite in fertilization, the resulting cell, called the zygote, contains the full, double set of chromosomes. Half of these chromosomes normally come from one parent and half from the other.\n\nFor more than 50 years after the science of genetics was established and the patterns of inheritance through genes were clarified, the largest questions remained unanswered: how are the chromosomes and their genes copied from cell to cell, and how do they direct the structure and behaviour of living things? Two American genet
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in general,\nphenotype = genotype + environment\n\nor in layman's terms,\nman = genes + lifestyle
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Genetic Identity is an estimate of the % of nucleotides shared between two taxa (i.e. species).  When two species are compared there may be a single gene taken from variety of different individuals used that all have subtle variations in that gene.  There may also be multiple genes (or proteins) observed.  Since there's variance in that sample, statistical summaries are useful (such as mean, median or mode).  Median is considered the most useful and the most frequently reported.\n\nSo if a number of genes are looked at and a median sequence identity of 90% is reported then it means that the median value for the similarity of the comparison between genes among those two species is 90%.
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Determination = resolve, to be determined.\nPossibly it could mean the structural analysis based on perceivable and quantifyable characteristics to determine which species a certain specimen belongs to. Like in the plant world.
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little or no genetic variation, which is considered a detriment to the organism. It also means that it only take one to tango, so if the population is spread out, the species can still propogate itself. There was this great study done with minnows. They lived ina stream that would dry up into little pools every season. The fish were asexual in the dry season and sexual when they could find a mate.
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The biological species concept would call them, two species, if they did not interbreed. A geneticists may disagree on the grounds of lack of great genetic variation. A species and a variant are the same thing, for practical purposes, which makes it tricky. We do not draw typological lines in the sand, anymore, I think genetic methods will win out, but as a biologist, I go with the biological species concept. Read, Richard Dawkins and Ernst Mayr for opposite views on the subject.
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1. at a basic level, genetic traits are determined ultimately by the DNA sequence. Differences in the DNA sequence between individuals may result in differences in traits. Differences in the DNA sequence of a gene are known as alleles. \n\n2. The traits determine the characteristics of an organism because the DNA sequence manifests itself as a protein. DNA is transcribed into RNA which is then processed (spliced) into mRNA. mRNA is translated at the ribosome (through the use of tRNA which brings in amino acids) into a polypeptide or protein. Differences in protein sequence may alter protein function thus resulting in an altered trait, also known as a phenotype.
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1. The trait must be genetic.\n\n2. There needs to be variation within the gene between different individuals (e.g. two or more alleles for a single gene).\n\n3. There needs to be differing fitness between alleles (e.g. one allele gives a reproductive advantage over another).
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Everything about a life form is decided by DNA from the colour of it's fur or skin to it's size. This is what our parents pass on to us. However, if this is not copied properly when it is passed on to an egg or sperm cell, which becomes a baby, then the baby may have a different characteristic from the rest of its species. This is called a mutation. If this mutation gives the animal an advantage over other animals in it's species- for example if it makes a moth brown instead of white so it can blend in on trees more, and is less likely to be eaten by predators, then that animal is more likely to survive. If it then mates and passes on it's mutated DNA to more offspring then they are more likely to survive so slowly the white moths would be eaten where the brown would not, and the species has 'evolved' to be brown. Every animal you can think of has been formed by tiny mutations over millions of years. We owe evolution quite a lot!
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Scientists cannot be sure. We haven't found all species on the planet. So I presume that the number of genetic codes is equivalent to the number of species. \n\nIn order for a species to be called a species, it must have a different genetic code from another species.