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.
Deestan@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.