Submitted by THRWLT t3_yvajq7 in askscience
Gavus_canarchiste t1_iwgn76o wrote
Other posts explained it well, so just adding a fun fact.
Basically, in theory for every gene, every parent can give one of their two versions, that differ in a few percent of cases.
If you take into account all possible combinations of alleles given by each parent, you get 10⁵⁰⁸ possibilities for the baby's genome.
That number makes no sense. For comparison, there's about 10⁸⁰ particles in the observable universe...
(Details: there's about 20,000 genes, 6,7% of which are heterozygous, so about 1,340. For every such gene, you have 2 choices: allel 1 or 2? So, total of 2^1340... squared, because there's two parents. This doesn't even take into account mutations that always occur.)
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