Quote Originally Posted by paulh View Post
The terms dominant, codominant and recessive do not describe an inherant property of a given gene. They are comparative.
Thank you. This is true, but it seems very few people (in reptiles and in general) understand this.

It is usually safe to talk about a gene being recessive (or dominant, or codom) and just let the assumption be that we are talking about in comparison to the normal gene. But in cases where there are more than 2 choices on the same loci, such as in the BEL complex, it gets much more complex.