What in the reproductive process is so successful in causing 50% of each parents DNA to turn into a normal human?
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As others have said, the genes of most animals come in pairs, and there is an incredibly intricate process called meiosis which ensures that offspring get one member of each pair of genes from each parents, so you aren’t just randomly splitting the DNA in half and hoping for the best.
However! Randomly splitting the DNA in half and hoping for the best *is* what a lot of microbes do! This is for asexual reproduction, not sexual, but essentially what they do is gather all their DNA in a big clump in the middle of the cell, and then just pull the clump in two with no organization. The reason this works is that instead of 2 copies of each gene, ciliate eykaryotes that use this process can have as many as several thousand copies, so just by sheer chance they’re bound to have at least a few copies of each gene in both daughter cells. Over time though, imbalances do accumulate, and the microbe will actually transition to using sexual reproduction to get itself organized and replenish its genes before going back to the asexual process. Ciliate eykaryotes are super common and include really well-known organisms like paramecia, so while definitely not the norm, this kind of random, hope-for-the-best approach to DNA and reproduction is definitely an important process!
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