Question

the origin of life broadly conforms to the Oparin-Haldane model, then early in life's origin there was not a distinction between genotype and phenotype. Describe at least two features that distinguish genotype from phenotype (2). At what stage in the evolution of life would it have been possible to make this distinction (1)? Explain your answer. (2)

Answer 1

Phenotypes are the visible characteristics of an organism. In the case of humans, phenotypes are determined by things like eye color, hair color, hair texture, or skin color.

Genotype is the total genes, or genome, of an organism, whether they are expressed or not, visibile or not.

For example, a brown-eyed person can have both a dominant gene encoding for brown eye color, and a recessive gene encoding for blue eye color. Phenotypically, this person has brown eyes, but his genotype includes both brown eyes genes and blue eyes genes.

Phenotype could have been distinguished from genotype when the firs multicellular organisms emerged.