zlacker

Genetics. I still have no intuition for how combining my wife’s and my DNA has resulted in children with traits from both of us. My brain always tries to imagine interleaving two binaries and hoping for a resulting program that works a bit like the two sources, which it of course wouldn’t.

>>LVB+(OP)
I mean that's close, but not compiled binaries, just merged in very similar source code in a pull request, where sometimes an && is added to a conditional statement to express a gene that had skipped a generation.

Both sexes have haploid gametes, which form a zygote when combined. I think this can steer your research when you look into what gametes contain and chromosome combination.

>>LVB+(OP)
Don't think if it as a monolith. It's more like thousands of microservices and thousands of different binaries all interacting in a whole bunch of different and convoluted ways. Sexual reproduction is jumbling together two different people's thousands of microservices and seeing what happens. Or, each program is relying one library, imagine just randomly mixing around different libraries. Genes and proteins are discrete parts that can be swapped out and in.

>>LVB+(OP)
The analogy works if each binary way laid out the same - the first MB is eye color, the 2nd MB was hair color, etc. Each segment of code is also duplicated.

When you produce sex cells, you body splits the code randomly. The cell might contain the first copy for hair color, but the 2nd copy for eye color. This happens in both the sperm and eggs.

Then when they combine you have a full set of genetic data again, but it’s a random selection of 50% of you DNA.

The fun part is that the code itself determines which copy is dominant. Your offspring has a copy of your eye color data, and your wife’s.

Added on that is that the two copies combine to produce the outcome. Depending on the code, the dad’s copy might dominate, or the mother’s, or the both of them can produce yet a 3rd outcome.