How’s the sequence of nitrogenous bases of a newborn baby determined from the parents’ two different DNAs?
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The baby gets a copy from the father and one from the mother. Both mother and father have copies from their parents and randomly pass either of their copies to the kid. You got two sets of DNA in you! Which one gets read off is sometimes even decided by each and every cell itself. Especially the sex chromosome of women is read only one per cell, not both. Which of the x chromosome gets shut down and which is read is decided randomly: a woman’s skin is a patchwork of cells that either read papas or mamas x chromosome.
But you are wondering about something interesting: namely that you need only a certain amount of gene products but actually got two blueprints for every gene. Sometimes both blueprints are read with half capacity, sometimes one is shut down for good and the other read at normal capacity (I’m simplifying it, gene expression regulation and cross talk between the two chromosomes is far from understood entirely)
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