That is incorrect. Any parent with a recessive allele will can expect on average to pass on that allele to 50% of their children, regardless of what alleles their partner has.

Now, that allele may not be expressed in any of their children depending on their partner's alleles, but that's different from transmission. A kid who has the allele but doesn't express it still has the allele and can also expect to pass it on to 50% of their own kids.

Maybe you are under the impression that only beneficial genes get transmitted ? In which case a recessive allele not being expressed (and therefore not given a chance to be beneficial) would be a problem. But that's not the case. Alleles don't even need to be beneficial to take over the population ! The baseline way an allele spreads or not if we assume its effect is neutral is a random walk: every generation has a bit more or a bit less of the allele than the previous, depending on the luck of the draw in terms of which of their two alleles parents passed down to their kids, and this leads the percentage of the population with the allele to go up and down randomly until it reaches 0% or 100%, after which it stays there (either because it's no longer there to be passed on, or there are no other alleles to be passed on instead of it). Mathematically it can be shown that given enough time, one allele must necessarily take over the population simply because a random walk going on for infinite time passes through every possible point, which means every allele will at some point hit 0% until one is left at 100%. The odds of any given allele eventually taking over the population is equal to its share of the population (so an allele that's in 10% of the population has a 1 in 10 chance of being the one to eventually take it over).

Of course in practice there are new alleles appearing all the time, and the maths vary when the population size changes and such. However the key thing to understand here is that whether an allele is beneficial or harmful doesn't really change the basic dynamics of how it spreads, it just nudges the probabilities - a beneficial allele is more likely to increase than decrease in frequency every generation, and a harmful allele does the opposite. This means that the odds of a beneficial allele taking over the population is bigger than for a neutral one, and the odds of a harmful allele taking over the population is virtually nil unless it's practically neutral.

For a beneficial gene to be recessive means in practice that it's more weakly beneficial than if it were dominant - there is still a benefit because there's a chance some of your kids and grandkids will be heterozygous for it and reap its benefits, but it's clearly less of a benefit than if it were guaranteed to express every time. However that still puts it at or above the neutral baseline, and neutral alleles get passed on just fine.

Cool ! Paging @donnachaidh@lemmy.world & @TruckBC@lemmy.ca & @randint@feddit.nl if they haven't seen this.

I agree and think this is a good idea - I reposted a long comment like five times making an argument for why it was and I won't repost it again but it got quite a bit of pushback and engagement on this thread in this forum:

https://lemmy.world/comment/1544467

(are there permalinks to comments & comment threads on Lemmy ?)

Paging @donnachaidh@lemmy.world, who seemed interested.

A reference to sub.rehab could also be cool.

Dominant and recessive genes aren't in some cage match to decide who will win. Basically everyone has two copies of every gene because we have two copies of all our chromosomes - one from each parent. "Dominant" and "recessive" are words that describe what happens when you happen to have two copies ("alleles") with slightly different effects, and the overall effect on the organism is the same as that of one of the alleles but not the other. When you have two alleles, A and a, with two different effects, and people with AA have effect 1 and people with aa have effect 2, and people with Aa have effect 1, then we say allele A is dominant over allele a - if you have both it's like you only had A.

But that's the effect on the organism. In terms of getting passed down to your own offspring, both alleles have the exact same odds of getting there: 50%. So being recessive doesn't get in the way of being passed down. In fact a lot of harmful alleles are recessive because it's the only way they can get passed down, if their effect doesn't always manifest and you need the bad luck of having two of them for it to happen. Being recessive also doesn't prevent a gene from having an effect, it's just that its effect will only be seen in individuals that happen to have two copies of it. That's less impactful than if the gene were dominant but it's not nothing.