What genetic principle explains why individual traits can be inherited independent of one another?

The Law of Independent Assortment is the genetic principle that describes how alleles for different traits are distributed to gametes independently of one another. This means that the inheritance of one trait does not influence the inheritance of another trait, allowing for a variety of combinations of traits in the offspring. For example, if you consider two traits such as flower color and seed shape in pea plants, the gene for flower color segregates independently from the gene for seed shape during meiosis.

This principle is crucial for understanding genetic variation because it helps explain how different traits can be passed down through generations without being linked or dependent on the inheritance of others. This is particularly evident in dihybrid crosses, where organisms with two different traits are studied, demonstrating the independent assortment of alleles.

The other options pertain to different aspects of inheritance. The Law of Segregation focuses on how allele pairs separate during gamete formation, the Principle of Dominance explains that some alleles can mask the effects of others, and the Principle of Uniformity relates to the idea that offspring from parents of the same phenotype will display those traits uniformly. Each of these principles describes different mechanisms of inheritance but does not specifically address the independence of trait inheritance as the Law of Independent Ass