Why do some people have better genes than others?

Answer 1

"Better" is a matter of opinion. It's like saying why do some people have better hair than others?

That being said, there are certain genes that unfortunately cause serious diseases, sometimes even fatal ones. Why do some people have those genes and others don't? Because over thousands of generations, people who had those diseases died before being able to reproduce. But not everyone who had the gene also had the disease. Why not? Because humans have two versions of each of their chromosomes. For each gene on a chromsome, the versions are called "alleles."

Different alleles can have very different effects. Eye color, for instance, is the result of different alleles. For some genes, there are dominant alleles and recessive alleles. You can have two dominant alleles, or you can have two recessive alleles, or you can have one of each. If you have one of each, only the dominant one is "expressed". That means your body has the same features as someone with two dominant alleles.

That's important for genetic disease research. It means that people can have a recessive allele that causes a disease, but tehy might not have the actual disease as long as they have a dominant allele, too. Those people are called "carriers." If a certain disease is very harmful, or even deadly, its allele might persist in the population at a very low rate because there are carriers out there. Occasionally if two carriers reproduce, they produce a child who inherits the recessive gene from both parents. That child would have the disease.

I hope that helps!

Answer 2

It all depends on the genes that you inherit from your parents. People random receive "Good" or "bad" genes from their parents.