Just to be well and truly fuckin clear. I am not now nor have I ever been nor will I ever be contemplating shagging a family member.

  • where_am_i@sh.itjust.works
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    1 年前

    Ok, but why are recessive genes necessarily bad?

    Or, they probably aren’t, but it turns out when you activate them you get more bads than the goods. Why is that?

    • Deestan@lemmy.world
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      1 年前

      Good question!

      They aren’t necessarily bad as such, just “random and unfiltered”.

      Dominant genes get “battle tested” all the time, by definition. The harmful ones are likely to result in a human that can’t survive or have children, while the good ones remain.

    • wieson@feddit.de
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      1 年前

      Recessive isn’t always bad. In fact, many (maybe all) genetic traits have a dominant and a recessive information.

      For example peas. Let’s say there is a gene for colour. The dominant variation of the colour gene carries the information “green”. Let’s call this gene c for colour. Then there is a recessive variation with the information yellow.

      We’ll write the dominant information as capital C and the recessive as lowercase c.

      Now there is a pea with the genetic information CC (one from each parent). That’s a green pea.

      Then there is one with Cc (father green, mother yellow). But you see the pea and it looks just like a green pea. Because the green gene C is dominant and the yellow c is recessive. You don’t know, that this is a mixed variety.

      If two seemingly green peas pollinate each other, but under the hood, they are Cc, then they might produce a cc yellow pea.

      For a lot of genetic information that’s not a problem, they are just different characteristics and not harmful.

      But if you have B = your blood coagulates normally, and b = your blood doesn’t thicken, you just bleed out and die when you have a paper cut…

      Then inheriting b from both of your parents is a terrible fate.

      This happened in the House of Saxe-Cobourg and other nobility in the 19th century.

      Edit: the last part is actually a bit more complicated, but the explanation of dominant and recessive still works.