> 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.

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

Four prototypes?

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.

Ahh, as in fully exclusive sets of genes

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.

Probably genotype. Isn't it

>Four prototypes?

gp said four unique prototypes

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

Kinda but the mother always provides the mitochondria.

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!

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

My experience as well. My two are so different it’s hard to even parent at times as they need different kinds of attention. You can’t really give yourself in different ways at the same time. We recognize that one - being born in the lockdown environment - is likely different in meaningful ways than our first. Our first is helpful in she almost recognizes a difference.