Mendelian Genes are All-Or-Nothing

A Mendelian gene is an all-or-nothing entity. When you were conceived, what you received from your father was not a substance, to be mixed with what you received from your mother as if mixing blue paint and red paint to make purple. If this were really how heredity worked (as people vaguely thought in Darwin's time) we'd all be a middling average, halfway between our two parents. In that case, all variation would rapidly disappear from the population (no matter how assiduously you mix purple paint with purple paint, you'll never reconstitute the original red and blue). In fact, of course, anybody can plainly see that there is no such intrinsic tendency for variation to decrease in a population. Mendel showed that this is because when paternal genes and maternal genes are combined in a child (he didn't use the word 'gene', which wasn't coined until 1909), it is not like blending paints, it is more like shuffling and reshuffling cards in a pack. Nowadays, we know that genes are lengths of DNA code, not physically separate like cards, but the principle remains valid. Genes don't blend; they shuffle. You could say they are shuffled badly, with groups of cards sticking together for several generations of shuffling before chance happens to split them.

Any one of your eggs (or sperms if you are male) contains either your father's version of a particular gene or your mother's version, not a blend of the two. And that particular gene came from one and only one of your four grandparents; and from one and only one of your eight greatgrandparents.

Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2010-08-24)

• genes
• inheritance
• mendel