Eli5 what decides whether genes are dominant or recessive
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Let’s say you’re Rachel from Friends and you’re about to make dinner for girls night. You have two identical recipe books, one is fine, and the other has pages that stick together. You know you’re not a great cook so you decide to make two of each dish just in case one turns out bad.
The first book has the normal recipe. No problems there, your trifle is perfect. The second book with the sticky pages leads to you adding meat and peas to your trifle. Yuck.
Whether a gene is dominant or recessive basically depends on the effect of the mistake.
If your dinner guest is Monica, the sight of your meat trifle will make her freak out so bad she won’t even look at your other, perfectly fine trifle. The mistake had an effect on the receptor. That’s a dominant mistake: the bad trifle was so bad it put Monica off the rest of the food.
If your dinner guest is Phoebe, she won’t mind that you made a mistake, she’ll politely take a serving of the normal trifle and ignore the meat one. The mistake had no effect on the receptor. That’s a recessive mistake: the good trifle made up for the bad one, and all is forgiven.
In your body, a mistake in DNA is only a problem if it translates into a faulty protein, and if that faulty protein has an effect on how the cells function. Most of the time, having one “good” copy of a gene is sufficient to make you function normally, as long as the bad protein doesn’t wreak havoc on its own
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