The Pith: In this post I examine how looking at genomic data can clarify exactly how closely related siblings really are, instead of just assuming that they’re about 50% similar. I contrast this randomness among siblings to the hard & fast deterministic nature of of parent-child inheritance. Additionally, I detail how the idealized spare concepts of genetics from 100 years ago are modified by what we now know about how genes are physically organized, and, reorganized. Finally, I explain how this clarification allows us to potentially understand with greater precision the nature of inheritance of complex traits which vary within families, and across the whole population.
Humans are diploid organisms. We have two copies of each gene, inherited from each parent (the exception here is for males, who have only one X chromosome inherited from the mother, and lack many compensatory genes on the Y chromosome inherited from the father). Our own parents have two copies of each gene, one inherited from each of their parents. Therefore, one can model a grandchild from two pairs of grandparents as a mosaic of the genes of the four ancestral grandparents. But, the relationship between …