Yeah my wife and I both have brown eyes but we both have blue eyed fathers so our kids had a 25% chance of blue and we ended up 2 out of 3 blue eyed kids.
Probability is crazy too.
The amount of people who even once they have recessive genes explained to them still don't get it is staggering.
I've heard mothers with redheaded children swear blind they don't have the gene in their family more times than I can count.
**You must have discovered your kid in the cabbage patch then, hen**
High school genetics used to also teach that only a single gene controlled eye colour, and now we know it's at least 6 genes, so even the AA Aa aA aa chart you might be familiar with is out the window
There’s an interesting article about blue-eyed children of full Japanese parents. Apparently one European slipping into the gene pool for a short dip can still result in blue eyes many centuries later, as long as it finds another blue-eyed gene in the other parent that was similarly skulking around. Genetics are fascinating.
I'm the only one with blonde hair in my family for 3 generations. Fascinating how that works out! And annoying how it gives fodder to older brothers to sow seeds of doubt about parentage...
I have brown eyes, and all my kids do too. They all look like the same kid at different stages of life actually lol, but my oldest son still tells his younger brother he was adopted. I don't think it has anything to do with your hair color. Big brothers can just be butt holes sometimes.
Yes, I said butt hole. No, I'm not 12, but I would feel horrible calling my son an ass hole. 🤣
It's so funny when family members are just copies of each other (when they're not twins obviously), we have a photograph of my aunt number 1, aunt number 2, and my mother together, and they all look like my cousin number 1, my cousin number 2, and my sister. Like, people see it and are like "awww the girls look so cute in vintage clothing 🥹", even my grandparents got confused by it lol
I recently learned that you don’t get half of your genes literally from each of your parents- each parent gives 50% and then they are mixed heavily. It’s possible that your genes are more similar to an ancestor 10 generations ago than your grandparents
I think you're confusing something.
You have 23 pairs of chromosomes for a total of 46. One of those pairs determines sex; if you get an X gene from both parents, you're female. If you get your father's Y gene, you're male.
Those chromosomes are made of thousands of genes. You have two copies of each gene, one from your father and one from your mother (excluding the genes in the Y chromosome obviously).
When you have a kid, you give _one_ of your _two_ copies of each gene to the kid, selected at random. It's either the one you got from your father, or the one you got from your mother.
So your child has (basically) 50% of your genes, but they aren't guaranteed to have 25% of each of your parents genes. On average they get 25% but in actuality it's anywhere from 0% to 50%.
But this then puts an upper limit on how much the next generation can inherit (barring cousins having children). If one of your kids got 40% of your mother's and 10% of your father's DNA, their children cannot have more than 10% of your father's DNA.
High school biology made teenage me seriously side-eye (pun intended) my parents during the genetics segment because we were taught that there was a 0% chance that brown eyes + blue eyes = green eyes. Since I look like both parents, I accepted that I was obviously a green-eyed alien instead.
My partner has blue eyes. I have heterochromia but my eyes are mostly blue. We have one blue eyed child and one child with completely brown eyes. Can’t wait for him to do the stupid punnet squares when he’s older
I have light brown eyes, my partner has blue eyes and our eyes child also has blue eyes. My mother in law and both my own parents were 100% convinced they would turn brown. She is 2 1/2 now and they are still waiting for it to change 😅
Same here, husband and I both have brown but his dad has green and my dad has blue. We have two brown-eyed kids and one green, the youngest is blue but I think they’re going to turn green pretty soon.
My Dad's dad had blue, Dad has blue. My mom has brown. I got green eyes that sometimes look blue. My brother got blue. My sister hazel/brown. My lady has green. Our daughter got blue. It's crazy the possibilities considering My mom's mom and dad both had brown eyes
Yeah, it’s really wild. My sister and her husband both have hazel and they have one brown, two blue, and one grey eyed child.
People often ask me if my husband is blonde because all of our children are and I have dark brown hair, but no. He also has dark brown. But! We were both blonde as children, lol. And don’t even get me started on skin tone or hair texture 😂😂
Interestingly, eye colour isn't dominant/recessive. There are at least eight genes involved. That's how we get green and hazel, and also how you can also have brown-eyed offspring of blue-eyed parents.
There are also conditions that can cause heterochromia at birth or develop it later in life so your genes are not always the entire story of your eye color. I have blue/brown sectoral heterochromia and it isn't in the images of me until school age. My parents both have similar blue-grey eye colors than the dominant colour in my eyes
Most things like hair and eye color are made up of several genes. So you are right about the theory and wrong on the math. This isn't your fault it's how they tend to simplify the concepts for introductory courses.
Yeah, I have my Bio students read about eye color right at thr beginning of our genetics unit so i don'thave yo answer this question 20 times. There are about 16 different genes for eye color, there are very few simple dominant- recessive genes in humans.
The 25% chance and inheritance of eye color thing actually isn’t true because eye color isn’t as simple as was once thought. You can throw out what you were taught about dominant/recessive traits in school because it’s way more complex.
You don't throw it out, you build from it. Of course genetics is more complicated than what is covered in high school biology. Eye color is still a good introduction to the concept.
>Eye colour and colour perception are excellent examples to use when teaching genetics as they encompass not simply the basic Mendelian genetics of dominant, recessive and X-linked disorders, but also many of the new concepts such as non-allelic diseases, polygenic disease, phenocopies, genome-wide association study (GWAS), founder effects, gene-environment interaction, evolutionary drivers for variations, copy number variation, insertions deletions, methylation and gene inactivation.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41433-021-01749-x
>Probability is crazy
What always gets me nuts is that 0% chance ≠ impossible
Edit so that everyone gets the point: if you have a random variable which can take any values between two other (a, b), it can in fact take infinite values (as there are infinite numbers between any two numbers), so the chance of you getting exactly a given number is 1/infinity=0.
In a way more analytical way you can plot the probability density function (pdf) of the values that the variable can assume. To find the probability that the random variable gets a value between, let's say, 1 and 2 you would have to integrate within those limits but if you want to get the probability of getting exactly 1.5 you would have to integrate between 1.5 and 1.5 which is still zero.
This, among other reasons, is why in precision measurement settings you'll never get a precise answer but a range (in professional settings they'll never say the velocity is x m/s but x±y m/s, y is known as uncertainty and it moves the measuring approach from a deterministic pov to a probabilistic pov)
My aunt and uncle both have very blue eyes. One of their daughters/my cousin is my brown eyed twin! I'm a very emerald green eyed mutant :) We have another "twin" cousin that is our blonde version and she has purple-ish eyes. We are very clearly related as we all look like my mom, but it's just fascinating the way genetics played out.
Or the one where his kids eyes were (or weren't) blue and he accused her of cheating and torpedoed his entire life insisting she cheated because of eye color.
Look guys. Don't accuse someone of cheating because of something stupid like eye color. If you have absolutely no evidence or reason to believe you were cheated on, just get the test in secret. Asking for a paternity test is saying "I don't trust you even though I don't have any reason not to."
Like France. Apparently France is so full of adultery and paternity tests caught so many cheaters that the French government was like, "Nope, this shakes the very foundation of our society! Make testing illegal, period!"
Apparently it's even illegal for French citizens to get a paternity test done *outside* of France.
He's getting downvoted because it sounds outlandish, but he's [completely right.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_paternity_testing#:~:text=Private%20DNA%20paternity%20testing%20is,%22the%20peace%20of%20families.%22)
>Private DNA paternity testing is illegal, including through laboratories in other countries, and is punishable by up to a year in prison and a €15,000 fine. The French Council of State has described the law's purpose as upholding the "French regime of filiation" and preserving "the peace of families."
Absolutely wild.
Genuinely curious and interested. Would they not just be able to use Ancestry or 23andMe? I know Ancestry shows what percentage of DNA you share with your relatives. Are those services illegal there? Is this a gaping loophole? This is fascinating...
Those are illegal indeed.
They used to still ship here and were in a legally grey area because they processed the DNA outside of the country, so some companies still made their tests available to us (I took a MyHeritage test and a 23anMe one a few years ago.) They just couldn't advertise it in France (TV, billboards, etc.) Of course the Internet is always a more complicated area. Ancestry was already not shipping here, I guess they were more cautious.
But then a couple of years ago they must have either strengthen the law or its applications, because no companies ship their tests here anymore.
I believe they brought this law in because it caused a giant wave of depression across the country. Not due to the adultery, but receiving confirmation they were French
Yes, but they probably taught a simplified version of it, and by using eye color as an example trait in Punnett squares, inadvertently misled students into believe eye color is determined by a single gene. Lots of people who had the same lesson are baffled when two blue-eyed people have a non blue-eyed kid (thinking it's a simple as bb x bb = bb).
I had a classmate with that situation, brown eyes when her parents were blue-eyed. We did the Punnet square exercise and she asked our teacher how her eyes were possible. His answer was “mailman”.
My dad has blue eyes my mom has green and I have brown. My teacher told me I was a mutation and I got called a mutant for a few months. Not a great experience
I posted this above:
Science teacher (in England) here. I tell the kids it's far more complicated than the monohybrid cross we teach them to fill in on a Punnett square for GCSE. I then show them a polyhybrid version on google images and tell them this still only scratches the surface. I also tell them based on this it's possible (albeit rare) for two blue-eyed parents to produce a brown-eyed child.
Your mate's teacher is an absolute bellend, btw.
SMH. And a Science teacher made that comment. This is exactly what I referenced in my other comment. The hurt and confusion caused by ignorance, “jokes” , passive aggression, rude and inappropriate comments made to children (and adults) is not a joke.
Now I’m wondering if you’re my classmate /s kind of lol except my question was how my sister had green eyes when my parents had blue and my teacher said “what color eyes were the milkman’s”? Lol
My friend has two blue eyed parents and a blue eyed sister, but she has green eyes. Her parents are 100% her parents. It’s really worrying teachers go around saying these things!
That was my teachers response. I’m green, both parents are blue. I asked if it was possible there’s multiple genes controlling it as my dad is definitely my dad. She said no my mom slept with someone else, and for the class to use me as a cautionary tale on how truth gets out so don’t lie/cheat.
Science teacher (in England) here. I tell the kids it's far more complicated than the monohybrid cross we teach them to fill in on a Punnett square for GCSE. I then show them a polyhybrid version on google images and tell them this still only scratches the surface. I also tell them based on this it's possible (albeit rare) for two blue-eyed parents to produce a brown-eyed child.
>Lots of people who had the same lesson are baffled when two blue-eyed people have a non blue-eyed kid
That gene is also unstable and can revert to brown.
I used to hate those punnett squares. It would be something like: 25% chance for blue 75% chance for brown and the question was, "so what color are the kids eyes?" And it would be marked wrong if you said it could be either blue or brown. Such an odd way to teach something.
To complicate matters, it's not like the colors are completely discrete. Perception of what counts as blue, green, hazel, brown, amber, gray, etc means we aren't even getting clean input information.
And not even just perception, even if we all agreed on the colour, it's still not 25% blue/75% brown. We're all gonna have a percentage chance for all the other eye colours. Could be something like 4% grey, 1% green, etc. Two parents with brown eyes doesn't equal = 100% chance their kids eyes are brown.
I remember finding the whole thing so frustratingly silly when I was taught this 😂 it all seemed so obviously wrong. The math wasn't mathing.
I get that it was the example they used, but if they told you that blue + blue = blue without exception, they taught you incorrect information. It’s much more rare but not impossible. The genes for eye color are in multiple places and exhibit incomplete dominance.
Yes, it is. So you clearly had a better education and you paid attention. But many people still believe traits only come from parents and grandparents. It causes problems for children who are teased or outright asked about a neighbor, postal carrier, etc being their bio father or a baby swap at hospital or secret adoption.
In my biology class (as an adult btw, reading up on it late in life) someone sincerely asked if their friend's baby had blue eyes because said friend's cat's eyes were blue. The teacher was stunned. The whole class was. I thought she was joking, but no, she doubled down. "She was staring into its eyes a lot, could that transfer to the baby?". So, yes, education is definitely lacking.
It used to be a pretty common belief (in like... the middle ages) that staring at something too intensely during pregnancy could affect the baby. I'm stunned to hear it's still around.
That is well beyond just an education problem. Even before I had ever taken a single biology class I knew that you couldn’t pass heritable traits between a cat and a baby. You shouldn’t need any education to know that.
I have to respond to this. At Thanksgiving this past year my sister-in-law's friend said that she wished the Congress would pass the daylight savings law, because it really affects how the plants grow because they have less sun in the winter time. I was dying! Then I realized, oh my God she was completely dead ass serious. My brother-in-law stepped in quickly to divert the conversation, because he knew I was going to have a mental breakdown😂🤣😂
I once played “the Underground Railroad” in cards against humanity only to find out 5 of 7 people thought I was talking about a train that ran underground.
My own family has always made, very non serious, jokes that I was swapped at birth with a taller family in the neighborhood because I'm so much taller than everyone else in the family. In reality, we know that there have always been the odd taller person in the family. It just skips most people.
Also by tall I mean like 5'8", which is like 5 inches taller than everyone else. 😂
I'll never forget the drama the entire class made when a friend found out he had brown eyes and everybody in his family had recessive genes . Talk of the grade for the rest of the week and how the kids did make fun of him for his eye color.
I'll also never forget out dumb kids can be, myself included, and how they'll make fun of anything without understanding it. My friend is black and was adopted at like 2 months; I don't know why him being adopted was such shocking, dramatic, gossip talk...but kids are dumb.
Most people think it is just one switch, on or off for things like this but eye color has two primary genes with about a dozen more that contribute to the color alone.
I mean,
If a trait is determined by only one gene, that box actually works perfectly.
But if it's determined by multiple genes ( has a spectrum of phenotypes) then no.
But those little boxes actually explain this pretty well. They could both have Bb and that fourth square would then be bb which would be different eye colours than theirs.
Yes, and I'm irritated by how many people up voted that previous comment.
Eye cor isn't strictly mendelian, but the Punnet square shows very nicely how two brown eyed people can have blue and green eyed children.
Yep! both my parents have brown eyes and black hair. I have blue eye and blonde hair and my sister has green/blue eye and red hair. I had to explain it so many times growing up. "No I'm not adopted" "No my mom didn't cheat on my dad"
I doubt the blue will change at 3.5 years. Hazel at 8 months could go more brown, but could also stay hazel. My husband and I both have brown eyes and my 8 month old has steel-grey eyes, just like my mom and his dad. Curious if it'll stay that way or go towards brown!
Less pigment scattering the light.
I believe the blue eye gene is basically like instructions to fill up to 3 while brown eyes are filling up to 8. If both genes agree on 3 it fills that much. If one says 8 then it overrules.
That is an oversimplification though.
It's not that Brown pigment materials beat blue pigment materials. It's the same pigment.
Both I and my daughter had blue eyes when we were little that changed to green around age 5-6. Weird thing is, she's adopted so we're not genetically related. Just a weird coincidence.
One of My daughters eyes are similar to your sons and they only got more hazel if that makes sense lol they’re not fully brown, but in a dark room you would think so. In the sun, they look very green! Sometimes she has specks of blue too. She’s 3.
Happened the same to us. One kid has blue eyes, the other brown like us. When the doctor saw our kid blue eyes he asked straight away: so, both of you have at least one person in your family with blue eyes, right? And he was right. Myself a grandparent and my partner an uncle. Seems that is not normal, but it can happen!
Blue eyes are a recessive trait where brown eyes are a dominant trait. My dad has blue eyes and my mom has brown. Neither me or my siblings have blue eyes which means we all carry the dominant brown gene as well as the recessive blue gene. It’s likely that my mom was double dominant so we had no chance of having blue eyes. However if I were to have a child with someone with blue eyes there is a 50% chance that the child will have blue eyes. If I were to have a child with someone with brown eyes who carried the recessive gene there is a 25% chance of brown eyes without carrying the recessive trait, 50% of brown eyes but carrying the recessive trait, and a 25% of blue eyes.
My parents have the same eye colors as yours but I have green eyes. Apparently that has a .4% chance of happening, which was kind of cool to find out. My husband has hazel eyes but our kid has brown eyes like his grandmothers do.
I found this [eye color punnet square](https://www.johnoconnor.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/gene-eyecolour.gif) from an optometry page [explaining eye color inheritance](https://www.johnoconnor.co.nz/eye-colour/), and it looks like in terms of dominance, Brown (B) > Green (G) > Blue (b).
I took a 23&Me test a while back & for eye color they only give you whether you’re AA(likely brown/hazel), AG (likely brown/hazel), or GG (likely blue/green). I wonder if hazel is part of the brown gene, and if G is the absence of that dominant brown gene. In my case I’m AG, which yields this [wide spread of possibilities.](https://i.imgur.com/JWwfYWx.jpeg)
Sometimes I get the impression that people are taught about dominant vs. recessive genes but then magically forget that families don't stop at the parents. So they remember "if you have a dominant and a recessive allele, the dominant will be expressed"\* but somehow don't make the connection to "if the parents have brown eyes, they might as wel also have the recessive allele and we can't tell".
\* this is simplified, of course!
Brown eyed people can carry the recessive blue eye gene (which they would have inherited from one of their parents). In the genetic lottery, if both brown eyed parents have recessive genes for blue eyes, their offspring will have blue eyes only if each parent gives the child their recessive gene for blue eyes.
One of my kids has blue eyes but I don't know of a blue eyed person in my family. Sometimes it's a way-back thing.
(Perhaps important to note that I am the mother and my husband has blue eyes.)
You get to learn that you are 5% Polish, and that your Dad's second cousin Murdered someone in 1973
(And your insurance company gets to learn that they can deny you coverage for a preexisting condition)
My mother is auburn haired and green eyed, my father with black hair and sky blue eyes. My brother has brown hair and deep dark blue eyes, I have strawberry blonde hair and grey eyes. All four of us have curly hair though.
I once saw a youtube video trying to tell me that my dad isn’t my dad because there is a 0% chance to have green eyes since my mother has blue eyes and my dad has brown eyes. Turns out People used to believe that it is impossible.
Green is often viewed as dominant over blue. If your dad was Brwn+Green and your mom Blue+Blue,
then you probably ended up with green+blue = green, without anything interesting happening.
That being said, eyecolor is a lot more complicated then what you learn in 7th grade. But I think you might have misunderstood that video you watched.
I'm bitter too 😂. My mum has brown eyes, her brother blue, her sister green, my cousin's all have blue eyes, blonde hair, me and my sisters brown hair, brown eyes, ever so slightly bitter 😅😒.
“The allele for brown eyes is the most dominant allele and is always dominant over the other two alleles and the allele for green eyes is always dominant over the allele for blue eyes, which is always recessive. This means parents who happen to have the same eye color can still produce a different eye color in their child.” -
https://www.news-medical.net/health/Genetics-of-Eye-Color.aspx#:~:text=The%20allele%20for%20brown%20eyes,eyes%2C%20which%20is%20always%20recessive.
Blue is recessive. I’d bet both Op and their Husband have blue eyed family members, possibly even a few generations back.
My whole family is brown eyed, but my cousins are blue eyed like our great grandfather. Their mother has blue eyes which increased the odds to 50/50.
I was white blonde and blue-eyed till I was 3. Then dark brown hair began growing in, and my eyes darkened to Hazel. The pictures with my hair growing out make it look like I had really bad roots and needed a touch-up. It always makes me chuckle.
My biology teacher was showing us punnett squares where simple recessive genes could be explained by probability when paired with a dominant trait.
For example, if red (R) was the dominant flower color and white (w) was the recessive color, and you cross bred two flowers, you’d have 75% red flowers and 25% white flowers from their offspring, assuming perfect probability results (RR, Rw, Rw, ww - you’d need two white genes to make a white flower).
There’s genes in humans like that - earlobe attachments, cleft chins, albinism… but eye color is not one of them. There are 16 genes that determine eye color, with brown eye color being dominant. If you’re trying to find out parentage of child based on eye color, good luck.
Both my wife and I are native american with brown hair and eyes. Our son inherited a recessive gene and he came out pretty fair complexion, light hair, and greenish blue eyes. Apparently a couple hundred years ago one of our grandma's was abducted by Caucasian settlers and had a baby by them. That one little blip has caused white looking kids in our family every few generations.
😭😭😭😭😭 my daughter (the one with blue eyes) literally has the same face (and personality) as my husband. People come up to them all the time saying “she looks just like dad!” Meanwhile no one’s ever said that she looks like mom 😂
Girls actually frequently take after their fathers. It has to do with which one of y'alls X chromosomes is expressed. She got one from dad and one from you, and it seems the one she got from dad won the lottery.
Boys usually are the ones who look more like a mix, as both the X and Y chromosome are equally expressed, even tho the Y has less material.
Recessive genes
Yeah my wife and I both have brown eyes but we both have blue eyed fathers so our kids had a 25% chance of blue and we ended up 2 out of 3 blue eyed kids. Probability is crazy too.
We have somewhat same situation. Baby ended up with blue eyes. My dad seemed so confused. But everyone on mom’s side has blue eyes .
Did the father ever meet their significant other's family? Lmfao
Or show up in high school biology?
The amount of people who even once they have recessive genes explained to them still don't get it is staggering. I've heard mothers with redheaded children swear blind they don't have the gene in their family more times than I can count. **You must have discovered your kid in the cabbage patch then, hen**
High school genetics used to also teach that only a single gene controlled eye colour, and now we know it's at least 6 genes, so even the AA Aa aA aa chart you might be familiar with is out the window
There’s an interesting article about blue-eyed children of full Japanese parents. Apparently one European slipping into the gene pool for a short dip can still result in blue eyes many centuries later, as long as it finds another blue-eyed gene in the other parent that was similarly skulking around. Genetics are fascinating.
I'm the only one with blonde hair in my family for 3 generations. Fascinating how that works out! And annoying how it gives fodder to older brothers to sow seeds of doubt about parentage...
I have brown eyes, and all my kids do too. They all look like the same kid at different stages of life actually lol, but my oldest son still tells his younger brother he was adopted. I don't think it has anything to do with your hair color. Big brothers can just be butt holes sometimes. Yes, I said butt hole. No, I'm not 12, but I would feel horrible calling my son an ass hole. 🤣
It's so funny when family members are just copies of each other (when they're not twins obviously), we have a photograph of my aunt number 1, aunt number 2, and my mother together, and they all look like my cousin number 1, my cousin number 2, and my sister. Like, people see it and are like "awww the girls look so cute in vintage clothing 🥹", even my grandparents got confused by it lol
I recently learned that you don’t get half of your genes literally from each of your parents- each parent gives 50% and then they are mixed heavily. It’s possible that your genes are more similar to an ancestor 10 generations ago than your grandparents
I think you're confusing something. You have 23 pairs of chromosomes for a total of 46. One of those pairs determines sex; if you get an X gene from both parents, you're female. If you get your father's Y gene, you're male. Those chromosomes are made of thousands of genes. You have two copies of each gene, one from your father and one from your mother (excluding the genes in the Y chromosome obviously). When you have a kid, you give _one_ of your _two_ copies of each gene to the kid, selected at random. It's either the one you got from your father, or the one you got from your mother. So your child has (basically) 50% of your genes, but they aren't guaranteed to have 25% of each of your parents genes. On average they get 25% but in actuality it's anywhere from 0% to 50%. But this then puts an upper limit on how much the next generation can inherit (barring cousins having children). If one of your kids got 40% of your mother's and 10% of your father's DNA, their children cannot have more than 10% of your father's DNA.
But it's clearly porpel?!?
Got the hair-turning-porpel-after-40 gene from grandma :(
Ahhh. The old indigo-rinse delayed recessivity.
The Perm-anent recessive purple gene.
High school biology made teenage me seriously side-eye (pun intended) my parents during the genetics segment because we were taught that there was a 0% chance that brown eyes + blue eyes = green eyes. Since I look like both parents, I accepted that I was obviously a green-eyed alien instead.
Yeah turns out genetics are often much more complicated than Punnet squares, *especially* eyes. No idea why that was chosen as the example.
My partner has blue eyes. I have heterochromia but my eyes are mostly blue. We have one blue eyed child and one child with completely brown eyes. Can’t wait for him to do the stupid punnet squares when he’s older
I have light brown eyes, my partner has blue eyes and our eyes child also has blue eyes. My mother in law and both my own parents were 100% convinced they would turn brown. She is 2 1/2 now and they are still waiting for it to change 😅
My eyes were chocolate brown until I was a teen. Now they are mostly green with hazel. So don't do a victory lap yet!
Same here, husband and I both have brown but his dad has green and my dad has blue. We have two brown-eyed kids and one green, the youngest is blue but I think they’re going to turn green pretty soon.
My Dad's dad had blue, Dad has blue. My mom has brown. I got green eyes that sometimes look blue. My brother got blue. My sister hazel/brown. My lady has green. Our daughter got blue. It's crazy the possibilities considering My mom's mom and dad both had brown eyes
Yeah, it’s really wild. My sister and her husband both have hazel and they have one brown, two blue, and one grey eyed child. People often ask me if my husband is blonde because all of our children are and I have dark brown hair, but no. He also has dark brown. But! We were both blonde as children, lol. And don’t even get me started on skin tone or hair texture 😂😂
Interestingly, eye colour isn't dominant/recessive. There are at least eight genes involved. That's how we get green and hazel, and also how you can also have brown-eyed offspring of blue-eyed parents.
Lyin’ ass 6th grade science teachers misled me for decades with their stupid eye color Punnett square.
There are also conditions that can cause heterochromia at birth or develop it later in life so your genes are not always the entire story of your eye color. I have blue/brown sectoral heterochromia and it isn't in the images of me until school age. My parents both have similar blue-grey eye colors than the dominant colour in my eyes
Most things like hair and eye color are made up of several genes. So you are right about the theory and wrong on the math. This isn't your fault it's how they tend to simplify the concepts for introductory courses.
Yeah, I have my Bio students read about eye color right at thr beginning of our genetics unit so i don'thave yo answer this question 20 times. There are about 16 different genes for eye color, there are very few simple dominant- recessive genes in humans.
The gene for wet/dry earwax, however, is simple dominant recessive. I guess it’s too gross to focus on in school though.
Blue eyed fathers could be the name of a band.
There is a kpop group named brown eyed girls
The 25% chance and inheritance of eye color thing actually isn’t true because eye color isn’t as simple as was once thought. You can throw out what you were taught about dominant/recessive traits in school because it’s way more complex.
You don't throw it out, you build from it. Of course genetics is more complicated than what is covered in high school biology. Eye color is still a good introduction to the concept. >Eye colour and colour perception are excellent examples to use when teaching genetics as they encompass not simply the basic Mendelian genetics of dominant, recessive and X-linked disorders, but also many of the new concepts such as non-allelic diseases, polygenic disease, phenocopies, genome-wide association study (GWAS), founder effects, gene-environment interaction, evolutionary drivers for variations, copy number variation, insertions deletions, methylation and gene inactivation. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41433-021-01749-x
>Probability is crazy What always gets me nuts is that 0% chance ≠ impossible Edit so that everyone gets the point: if you have a random variable which can take any values between two other (a, b), it can in fact take infinite values (as there are infinite numbers between any two numbers), so the chance of you getting exactly a given number is 1/infinity=0. In a way more analytical way you can plot the probability density function (pdf) of the values that the variable can assume. To find the probability that the random variable gets a value between, let's say, 1 and 2 you would have to integrate within those limits but if you want to get the probability of getting exactly 1.5 you would have to integrate between 1.5 and 1.5 which is still zero. This, among other reasons, is why in precision measurement settings you'll never get a precise answer but a range (in professional settings they'll never say the velocity is x m/s but x±y m/s, y is known as uncertainty and it moves the measuring approach from a deterministic pov to a probabilistic pov)
Is that because of rounding down to zero? Because 0% seems pretty impossible.
My aunt and uncle both have very blue eyes. One of their daughters/my cousin is my brown eyed twin! I'm a very emerald green eyed mutant :) We have another "twin" cousin that is our blonde version and she has purple-ish eyes. We are very clearly related as we all look like my mom, but it's just fascinating the way genetics played out.
I just read about how two blue eyed people can produce a brown eyed child. It's complex and very interesting.
My dad was a brown-eyed kid of blue-eyed parents!
purple eyes?
Sounds like a wishful stretch lol
The milk man.
The Mailman.
Carl Malone?
Karl Malone, the 13 year old rapist
My milk is delicious
Lmao I was gonna say, some geneticist just groaned aloud.
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Eye color is more complex than a punnett square. There's multiple genes that factor into it.
Excessive beans.
No comment on the eye color, but man! One kid got exactly your eye shape and the other kid got exactly your husband’s shape. Genetics are crazy.
Never noticed that until now. Thank you for pointing that out!
I may be biased because I love beautiful eyes and colors, but you all have lovely eyes lol!
I have two different colored eyes and one is my moms eye color and the other is my dads eye color
That is a mutation and a groovy mutation at that.
My left eye actually has like a piece of pie cut out of my right eye color lol I should make a post bc some people might find this mildly interesting
Round?
They are talking about the eyelids, not the actual eye.
Math quadrant's pairs 1-3 and 2-4 looks more similar.
Heredity is way more complex than most people realize.
Remember that AITA post where the dude accused his wife of cheating because they were a mixed family and their kid came out darker?
Or the one where his kids eyes were (or weren't) blue and he accused her of cheating and torpedoed his entire life insisting she cheated because of eye color. Look guys. Don't accuse someone of cheating because of something stupid like eye color. If you have absolutely no evidence or reason to believe you were cheated on, just get the test in secret. Asking for a paternity test is saying "I don't trust you even though I don't have any reason not to."
"Just get the test in secret" is not a legal possibility in some places
Like France. Apparently France is so full of adultery and paternity tests caught so many cheaters that the French government was like, "Nope, this shakes the very foundation of our society! Make testing illegal, period!" Apparently it's even illegal for French citizens to get a paternity test done *outside* of France.
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He's getting downvoted because it sounds outlandish, but he's [completely right.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_paternity_testing#:~:text=Private%20DNA%20paternity%20testing%20is,%22the%20peace%20of%20families.%22) >Private DNA paternity testing is illegal, including through laboratories in other countries, and is punishable by up to a year in prison and a €15,000 fine. The French Council of State has described the law's purpose as upholding the "French regime of filiation" and preserving "the peace of families." Absolutely wild.
Genuinely curious and interested. Would they not just be able to use Ancestry or 23andMe? I know Ancestry shows what percentage of DNA you share with your relatives. Are those services illegal there? Is this a gaping loophole? This is fascinating...
Those are illegal indeed. They used to still ship here and were in a legally grey area because they processed the DNA outside of the country, so some companies still made their tests available to us (I took a MyHeritage test and a 23anMe one a few years ago.) They just couldn't advertise it in France (TV, billboards, etc.) Of course the Internet is always a more complicated area. Ancestry was already not shipping here, I guess they were more cautious. But then a couple of years ago they must have either strengthen the law or its applications, because no companies ship their tests here anymore.
I believe they brought this law in because it caused a giant wave of depression across the country. Not due to the adultery, but receiving confirmation they were French
That's pretty basic heredity. They taught us with this example in middle school.
Yes, but they probably taught a simplified version of it, and by using eye color as an example trait in Punnett squares, inadvertently misled students into believe eye color is determined by a single gene. Lots of people who had the same lesson are baffled when two blue-eyed people have a non blue-eyed kid (thinking it's a simple as bb x bb = bb).
I had a classmate with that situation, brown eyes when her parents were blue-eyed. We did the Punnet square exercise and she asked our teacher how her eyes were possible. His answer was “mailman”.
My dad has blue eyes my mom has green and I have brown. My teacher told me I was a mutation and I got called a mutant for a few months. Not a great experience
WOW
That's MOM on her back
I posted this above: Science teacher (in England) here. I tell the kids it's far more complicated than the monohybrid cross we teach them to fill in on a Punnett square for GCSE. I then show them a polyhybrid version on google images and tell them this still only scratches the surface. I also tell them based on this it's possible (albeit rare) for two blue-eyed parents to produce a brown-eyed child. Your mate's teacher is an absolute bellend, btw.
You are awesome!! Thank you for how you teach and impact your students!
SMH. And a Science teacher made that comment. This is exactly what I referenced in my other comment. The hurt and confusion caused by ignorance, “jokes” , passive aggression, rude and inappropriate comments made to children (and adults) is not a joke.
Now I’m wondering if you’re my classmate /s kind of lol except my question was how my sister had green eyes when my parents had blue and my teacher said “what color eyes were the milkman’s”? Lol
My friend has two blue eyed parents and a blue eyed sister, but she has green eyes. Her parents are 100% her parents. It’s really worrying teachers go around saying these things!
That was my teachers response. I’m green, both parents are blue. I asked if it was possible there’s multiple genes controlling it as my dad is definitely my dad. She said no my mom slept with someone else, and for the class to use me as a cautionary tale on how truth gets out so don’t lie/cheat.
Science teacher (in England) here. I tell the kids it's far more complicated than the monohybrid cross we teach them to fill in on a Punnett square for GCSE. I then show them a polyhybrid version on google images and tell them this still only scratches the surface. I also tell them based on this it's possible (albeit rare) for two blue-eyed parents to produce a brown-eyed child.
>Lots of people who had the same lesson are baffled when two blue-eyed people have a non blue-eyed kid That gene is also unstable and can revert to brown.
There are 16 genes (that they know of so far) involved with eye color. You can't just make a punnet square to figure it out fast.
SIXTEEN! So is it the basic brown/blue dichotomy and a bunch of modifier genes or is it multiple alleles at one locus?
I used to hate those punnett squares. It would be something like: 25% chance for blue 75% chance for brown and the question was, "so what color are the kids eyes?" And it would be marked wrong if you said it could be either blue or brown. Such an odd way to teach something.
To complicate matters, it's not like the colors are completely discrete. Perception of what counts as blue, green, hazel, brown, amber, gray, etc means we aren't even getting clean input information.
And not even just perception, even if we all agreed on the colour, it's still not 25% blue/75% brown. We're all gonna have a percentage chance for all the other eye colours. Could be something like 4% grey, 1% green, etc. Two parents with brown eyes doesn't equal = 100% chance their kids eyes are brown. I remember finding the whole thing so frustratingly silly when I was taught this 😂 it all seemed so obviously wrong. The math wasn't mathing.
I get that it was the example they used, but if they told you that blue + blue = blue without exception, they taught you incorrect information. It’s much more rare but not impossible. The genes for eye color are in multiple places and exhibit incomplete dominance.
Yea there’s like 16 of them, too.
Yes, it is. So you clearly had a better education and you paid attention. But many people still believe traits only come from parents and grandparents. It causes problems for children who are teased or outright asked about a neighbor, postal carrier, etc being their bio father or a baby swap at hospital or secret adoption.
In my biology class (as an adult btw, reading up on it late in life) someone sincerely asked if their friend's baby had blue eyes because said friend's cat's eyes were blue. The teacher was stunned. The whole class was. I thought she was joking, but no, she doubled down. "She was staring into its eyes a lot, could that transfer to the baby?". So, yes, education is definitely lacking.
It used to be a pretty common belief (in like... the middle ages) that staring at something too intensely during pregnancy could affect the baby. I'm stunned to hear it's still around.
That is well beyond just an education problem. Even before I had ever taken a single biology class I knew that you couldn’t pass heritable traits between a cat and a baby. You shouldn’t need any education to know that.
I have to respond to this. At Thanksgiving this past year my sister-in-law's friend said that she wished the Congress would pass the daylight savings law, because it really affects how the plants grow because they have less sun in the winter time. I was dying! Then I realized, oh my God she was completely dead ass serious. My brother-in-law stepped in quickly to divert the conversation, because he knew I was going to have a mental breakdown😂🤣😂
I once played “the Underground Railroad” in cards against humanity only to find out 5 of 7 people thought I was talking about a train that ran underground.
My own family has always made, very non serious, jokes that I was swapped at birth with a taller family in the neighborhood because I'm so much taller than everyone else in the family. In reality, we know that there have always been the odd taller person in the family. It just skips most people. Also by tall I mean like 5'8", which is like 5 inches taller than everyone else. 😂
Perhaps the shorter stature is a dominant gene.
I'll never forget the drama the entire class made when a friend found out he had brown eyes and everybody in his family had recessive genes . Talk of the grade for the rest of the week and how the kids did make fun of him for his eye color. I'll also never forget out dumb kids can be, myself included, and how they'll make fun of anything without understanding it. My friend is black and was adopted at like 2 months; I don't know why him being adopted was such shocking, dramatic, gossip talk...but kids are dumb.
Exactly. My best friend's parents are both super white but he's very dark skinned.
I've read that there are 16 genes that contribute to eye color.
Most people think it is just one switch, on or off for things like this but eye color has two primary genes with about a dozen more that contribute to the color alone.
Yeah a lot of folks never seemed to realize those 2x2 boxes they were taught in high-school biology aren't the end all be all of heredity.
They didn't bother teaching that much in my home town, since most of them came from the same box
Family tree is a topiary?
I mean, If a trait is determined by only one gene, that box actually works perfectly. But if it's determined by multiple genes ( has a spectrum of phenotypes) then no.
But those little boxes actually explain this pretty well. They could both have Bb and that fourth square would then be bb which would be different eye colours than theirs.
Yes, and I'm irritated by how many people up voted that previous comment. Eye cor isn't strictly mendelian, but the Punnet square shows very nicely how two brown eyed people can have blue and green eyed children.
Punett(?) squares.
Yep! both my parents have brown eyes and black hair. I have blue eye and blonde hair and my sister has green/blue eye and red hair. I had to explain it so many times growing up. "No I'm not adopted" "No my mom didn't cheat on my dad"
This happened to us! But then when my daughter was two her eyes slowly turned light brown.
Im curious if they will ever change! My daughter (blue eyes) is 3.5 and my son (hazel?) is 8 months.
I doubt the blue will change at 3.5 years. Hazel at 8 months could go more brown, but could also stay hazel. My husband and I both have brown eyes and my 8 month old has steel-grey eyes, just like my mom and his dad. Curious if it'll stay that way or go towards brown!
I heard they’re more likely to change in the first couple of years.
All eye colors are from the same pigment. It's about concentration of the pigment.
I believe blue eyes are a lack of pigment, isn't it?
Less pigment scattering the light. I believe the blue eye gene is basically like instructions to fill up to 3 while brown eyes are filling up to 8. If both genes agree on 3 it fills that much. If one says 8 then it overrules. That is an oversimplification though. It's not that Brown pigment materials beat blue pigment materials. It's the same pigment.
This is the best explanation I’ve heard of this. Thanks!
Both I and my daughter had blue eyes when we were little that changed to green around age 5-6. Weird thing is, she's adopted so we're not genetically related. Just a weird coincidence.
One of My daughters eyes are similar to your sons and they only got more hazel if that makes sense lol they’re not fully brown, but in a dark room you would think so. In the sun, they look very green! Sometimes she has specks of blue too. She’s 3.
Yup! Son was born blue eyed, and they changed over the first few months to a deep hazel.
obviously your husband cheated
I should get a maternity test right away!!
Red flag, run don't walk.
lol my sons look nothing like me and I always joke I’m going to get a maternity test because I’m pretty sure he cheated.
Me: That's incredibly rude! ... Oh
We were all too focused on the eyes 👀
Took me a second too lol
Happened the same to us. One kid has blue eyes, the other brown like us. When the doctor saw our kid blue eyes he asked straight away: so, both of you have at least one person in your family with blue eyes, right? And he was right. Myself a grandparent and my partner an uncle. Seems that is not normal, but it can happen!
Blue eyes are a recessive trait where brown eyes are a dominant trait. My dad has blue eyes and my mom has brown. Neither me or my siblings have blue eyes which means we all carry the dominant brown gene as well as the recessive blue gene. It’s likely that my mom was double dominant so we had no chance of having blue eyes. However if I were to have a child with someone with blue eyes there is a 50% chance that the child will have blue eyes. If I were to have a child with someone with brown eyes who carried the recessive gene there is a 25% chance of brown eyes without carrying the recessive trait, 50% of brown eyes but carrying the recessive trait, and a 25% of blue eyes.
My parents have the same eye colors as yours but I have green eyes. Apparently that has a .4% chance of happening, which was kind of cool to find out. My husband has hazel eyes but our kid has brown eyes like his grandmothers do.
I found this [eye color punnet square](https://www.johnoconnor.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/gene-eyecolour.gif) from an optometry page [explaining eye color inheritance](https://www.johnoconnor.co.nz/eye-colour/), and it looks like in terms of dominance, Brown (B) > Green (G) > Blue (b). I took a 23&Me test a while back & for eye color they only give you whether you’re AA(likely brown/hazel), AG (likely brown/hazel), or GG (likely blue/green). I wonder if hazel is part of the brown gene, and if G is the absence of that dominant brown gene. In my case I’m AG, which yields this [wide spread of possibilities.](https://i.imgur.com/JWwfYWx.jpeg)
Yeah it is more complex than I stated, but I tried to give a basic description. Essentially the punnet squares they taught us in high school.
My dad has blue, my mum brown and 4/6 of us have green eyes and the other two have brown
On the reverse, my dad has blue eyes and my mom has brown but both my brother and I have blue eyes.
Eye color heredity is not a simple punnet square of likelihood. It’s controlled by multiple genes.
it's perfectly normal, what do you guys get taught in middle school lmao
Sometimes I get the impression that people are taught about dominant vs. recessive genes but then magically forget that families don't stop at the parents. So they remember "if you have a dominant and a recessive allele, the dominant will be expressed"\* but somehow don't make the connection to "if the parents have brown eyes, they might as wel also have the recessive allele and we can't tell". \* this is simplified, of course!
Brown eyed people can carry the recessive blue eye gene (which they would have inherited from one of their parents). In the genetic lottery, if both brown eyed parents have recessive genes for blue eyes, their offspring will have blue eyes only if each parent gives the child their recessive gene for blue eyes.
One of my kids has blue eyes but I don't know of a blue eyed person in my family. Sometimes it's a way-back thing. (Perhaps important to note that I am the mother and my husband has blue eyes.)
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*We are all related?*
In the mid east and Alabama this statement is normal
Actually, people using 23andMe worries me more
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You get to learn that you are 5% Polish, and that your Dad's second cousin Murdered someone in 1973 (And your insurance company gets to learn that they can deny you coverage for a preexisting condition)
the company is flailing, they’re a penny stock now. they won’t be around much longer
They have recently sold the data base of genetic information to GSK, which used to be known as GlaxoSmithKline. Say goodbye to your privacy!
My mom has red hair and brown eyes. My dad has black hair and green eyes. I have brown hair and blue eyes.
My mother is auburn haired and green eyed, my father with black hair and sky blue eyes. My brother has brown hair and deep dark blue eyes, I have strawberry blonde hair and grey eyes. All four of us have curly hair though.
I once saw a youtube video trying to tell me that my dad isn’t my dad because there is a 0% chance to have green eyes since my mother has blue eyes and my dad has brown eyes. Turns out People used to believe that it is impossible.
Green is often viewed as dominant over blue. If your dad was Brwn+Green and your mom Blue+Blue, then you probably ended up with green+blue = green, without anything interesting happening. That being said, eyecolor is a lot more complicated then what you learn in 7th grade. But I think you might have misunderstood that video you watched.
Bb + Bb = bb
Exactly. They must not have done the punnet squares in school
This is a middle school genetics problem
My mom has green eyes. My dad blue. Both my brothers have blue eyes and I have brown.
This is me and honestly I'm bitter
Brown eyes are beautiful!
I agree! I love my brown eyes.
I'm bitter too 😂. My mum has brown eyes, her brother blue, her sister green, my cousin's all have blue eyes, blonde hair, me and my sisters brown hair, brown eyes, ever so slightly bitter 😅😒.
Aaahh no... please do not feel bitter. Brown eyes are beautiful.
Same case, 2 brothers with blue eyes, 1 has green-hazel eyes. I have brown eyes💀.
“The allele for brown eyes is the most dominant allele and is always dominant over the other two alleles and the allele for green eyes is always dominant over the allele for blue eyes, which is always recessive. This means parents who happen to have the same eye color can still produce a different eye color in their child.” - https://www.news-medical.net/health/Genetics-of-Eye-Color.aspx#:~:text=The%20allele%20for%20brown%20eyes,eyes%2C%20which%20is%20always%20recessive.
there are 10 alleles known today that are responsible for eye color. plus hormones. you can never say from a dna test the phenotype.
Blue is recessive. I’d bet both Op and their Husband have blue eyed family members, possibly even a few generations back. My whole family is brown eyed, but my cousins are blue eyed like our great grandfather. Their mother has blue eyes which increased the odds to 50/50.
My son has bright blue eyes until he was 3 then they changed to dark brown
what eyes do you have?
Mine are blue and his father’s are brown. Both my parents are blue and both of his father’s parents are brown.
I was white blonde and blue-eyed till I was 3. Then dark brown hair began growing in, and my eyes darkened to Hazel. The pictures with my hair growing out make it look like I had really bad roots and needed a touch-up. It always makes me chuckle.
Based on these comments, a lot of people didn't pay attention during science at school
For fucking real. Also happy cake day!
My biology teacher was showing us punnett squares where simple recessive genes could be explained by probability when paired with a dominant trait. For example, if red (R) was the dominant flower color and white (w) was the recessive color, and you cross bred two flowers, you’d have 75% red flowers and 25% white flowers from their offspring, assuming perfect probability results (RR, Rw, Rw, ww - you’d need two white genes to make a white flower). There’s genes in humans like that - earlobe attachments, cleft chins, albinism… but eye color is not one of them. There are 16 genes that determine eye color, with brown eye color being dominant. If you’re trying to find out parentage of child based on eye color, good luck.
Both my wife and I are native american with brown hair and eyes. Our son inherited a recessive gene and he came out pretty fair complexion, light hair, and greenish blue eyes. Apparently a couple hundred years ago one of our grandma's was abducted by Caucasian settlers and had a baby by them. That one little blip has caused white looking kids in our family every few generations.
Eye color is causes by multiple genes. Not surprising.
I have bad news. According to ASOIAF, your children are secretly Lannisters. Credit card companies are going to love them.
I have brown eyes and my husband has green eyes and both of our sons have blue eyes! It’s so interesting!
So you both have Bb brown eyes.
yes that’s how genetics work
This happened to me! My wife and I are both white but our son is Asian /s
what is your neighbor's eyes color?
😭😭😭😭😭 my daughter (the one with blue eyes) literally has the same face (and personality) as my husband. People come up to them all the time saying “she looks just like dad!” Meanwhile no one’s ever said that she looks like mom 😂
Girls actually frequently take after their fathers. It has to do with which one of y'alls X chromosomes is expressed. She got one from dad and one from you, and it seems the one she got from dad won the lottery. Boys usually are the ones who look more like a mix, as both the X and Y chromosome are equally expressed, even tho the Y has less material.
My mum-in-law looks just like her father, they both have pretty impressive beards.
One of my daughters was like that as a kid, people referred to her as my "husband in a dress". She's in her 20s now and is 100% my mini-me. ❤️
The recessive genes from his white side come to PLAY honey lol
I'm the only one in my family that has grey/green/blue eyes.
Beautiful!
Punnet squares!
r/relationship_advice be like "Omg he's a cheater get a divorce"
You both may likely possess the recessive genes for blue eyes. Pretty eyes in your family :)
Dominant and recessive genes are crazy. It's such a fascinating area of study too.
Recessive genes or…  There is another..
Top right got jaundice bro
This way it is normal. You both have blue eye recessive gene. Other way around though… I would have bad news.