[CSMastermind]

> Might as well be raising a dog and a dolphin.

That made me chuckle.

But it's possible for siblings not to share any genetic material right?

A brother and a sister would obviously get different genes from their father and presumably there would be a 50/50 chance of them getting different genes from their mother.

There's four unique prototypes of children any two people can produce together.

[harry_ord]

> But it's possible for siblings not to share any genetic material right?

Kinda but the mother always provides the mitochondria.

[CSMastermind]

I think that's an area of open research: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1810946115

But yes, that's a good distinction I should have made!

[harry_ord]

Oh that's cool. Now I have something new to read thanks.

[caseymarquis]

I thought it was more like 2^23 unique prototypes?

[darkerside]

Four prototypes?

[danwills]

Gamete cells get a random half of all genes from each parent so there's about 2 unique possible 'sets' from each parent, and 2*2=4. However because it's random I think you can only say there are 4 distinct completely unique possibilities in theory, but it would be very unlikely for that to actually happen in practice.

[diroussel]

Each parent supplies half the genetic material. But each sperm and each egg have a randomly different set of one half of each chromosomes. So if you have 10 children chances are they each have a unique set of chromosomes.

[darkerside]

Ahh, as in fully exclusive sets of genes

[fsckboy]

>Four prototypes?

gp said four unique prototypes

[rand0mx1]

Probably genotype. Isn't it