beckygardener said:That is where my confusion about dominant vs. recessive comes in. Why would any white blooming children be considered a recessive gene if both parents are near-white and most of their other children seem to have near-white blooms (depending on what they were crossed with)? What would you consider to be their dominant color?
I think perhaps it is that there is no "their dominant color" of the seedlings.
Dominant and recessive describe specific alternatives of specific characteristics but not of specific seedlings or of specific individual plants.
Flower colour is the specific characteristic for the example. The flower colours red and white are the specific alternatives for that characteristic for the example.
So, flower colour is a specific characteristic. The overall colour of a daylily flower is made by a set of genes that function in a long pathway with each step controlled by a different gene and all the genes required to be normal and to function correctly for the flower to have a normal colour. The end result of a properly working pathway or assembly line is a pigment of a particular colour that is present in the flower. For the sake of these examples we can assume that the normal daylily flower is reddish (like the ditch lily species) and that the normal pigment is red. In our example, (please do not be too literal here as the example is not meant to be looked up in the AHS database nor are the registered offspring important) the alternative is no pigment or white flowers. In our example daylily flowers can be red or they can be white. One of those characteristics can be dominant and one can be recessive. If one is dominant then the other is recessive. Or the characteristics can be additive and neither is dominant or recessive.
Once we have made all the necessary different types of crosses between red flowered and white flowered daylilies and tabulated and analyzed the types of seedlings produced we can decide if red is dominant or if white is dominant or whether they are additive (and so on). Once that has been determined then the decisions are more or less permanent and apply to all crosses involving red and white flowered plants. We would always describe red flower colour as dominant to white flower colour. Across of two white flowered plants would be predicted to produce only white flowered seedlings because white flower colour was discovered to be inherited recessively.
