Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-75.133.22.18-20150921172853/@comment-6512-20150921175541

I've debated this to hell and back over the past ten years, and the best thing I've done to rationalize it is to just try and accept that perhaps genetics work very differently in the world of MGS. Shinkawa (the character designer for the MGS series) either didn't put too much thought into those things when he designed the characters, or just didn't particularly care.

There's a throwaway line in MGSV that tries to rationalize it by stating that Eli "doesn't really understand biology," and there are large chunks of MGS4 that dance around the fact that Solid and Liquid aren't pure copies of Big Boss which I've always taken as Kojima trying to dance around rationalising the whole "dominant" and "recessive" thing.

Although it seems very dismissive of people's theories and musings, I've always just taken it at face value. Liquid is the "dominant" clone, and Solid is the "recessive" one. Trying to figure out how that works and bringing in real world genetics has only lead to headaches and confusion, unfortunately.