Yes. The short answer is that brown-eyed parents can have kids with brown, blue or virtually any other color eyes. Eye color is very complicated and involves many genes.
(Due to rounding, percentages don't always add up to 100%.) Both parents with brown eyes: 75% chance of baby with brown eyes, 18.8% chance of baby with green eyes, 6.3% chance of baby with blue eyes.
A couple's children can have almost any eye color, even if it does not match those of either parent. Currently it is thought that eye color is determined by about six genes, so you can imagine how inheritance of eye color becomes very complicated.
If the brown-eyed mother carried the green allele (bG), she could pass the green allele on 50% of the time, so when married up with the father's blue allele, they could have a green-eyed child.
If both parents have a blue allele, it is likely that the child will have blue eyes. However, if one parent has green eyes and the other blue, your child will most likely have green eyes, as green is dominant over blue.
Green Eyes
Green is considered by some to be the actual rarest eye color in the world, though others would say it's been dethroned by red, violet, and grey eyes.
First, the answer is yes to both questions: two blue-eyed parents can produce green or brown-eyed children. Eye color is not the simple decision between the brown (or green) and blue versions of a single gene.
The gey gene has one allele that gives rise to green eyes and one allele that gives rise to blue eyes. The bey2 gene has one allele for brown eyes and one for blue eyes.
Essentially, green eyes are unique. Most common in Western, Northern, and Central Europe, green eyes often point to German or Celtic ancestry. Currently, they can be found most often in Iceland, the Netherlands, Scotland, Britain, and Scandinavia.
Green eyes are the most rare eye color in the world. Only about 2 percent of people in the world have naturally green eyes. Green eyes are a genetic mutation that results in low levels of melanin, though more melanin than in blue eyes. Green eyes don't actually have any color.
Your grandchildren inherit their eye colors from your child and their partner. It's a combination of mom and dad's eye colors. Generally, the color is determined by this mix and whether the genes are dominant or recessive.
Genetics and Eye Color
The trait that is hidden is called recessive. Brown eye color is a dominant trait and blue eye color is a recessive trait. Green eye color is a mix of both. Green is recessive to brown but dominant to blue.
Each parent will pass one copy of their eye color gene to their child. In this case, the mom will always pass B and the dad will always pass b. This means all of their kids will be Bb and have brown eyes. Each child will show the mom's dominant trait.
Of those four, green is the rarest. It shows up in about 9% of Americans but only 2% of the world's population. Hazel/amber is the next rarest of these.
At some point, you've probably wondered what the rarest eye color is. The answer is green, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO). Only about 2 percent of the world's population sport this shade.
All men inherit a Y chromosome from their father, which means all traits that are only found on the Y chromosome come from dad, not mom. The Supporting Evidence: Y-linked traits follow a clear paternal lineage.
We found that green is the most popular lens colour, with brown coming in a close second, despite it being one of the most common eye colours. Although blue and hazel are seen as the most attractive eye colours for men and women they are surprisingly the least popular.
So where did our green-eyed ancestors come from? Most origins point to areas around the Caucasus Mountains, which link Asia and Europe. That may help explain why so many different countries and continents have had green-eyed populations for thousands of years.
Twenty-nine percent of participants associated green eyes with sexiness, the top characteristic thought to be related to this color. Green-eyes was also thought of as creative (25 percent) and a little devious (20 percent). Being trustworthy and shy was also linked to green-eyed people.
The green color is caused by the combination of: 1) an amber or light brown pigmentation in the stroma of the iris (which has a low or moderate concentration of melanin) with: 2) a blue shade created by the Rayleigh scattering of reflected light. Green eyes contain the yellowish pigment lipochrome.
Hair color comes from both parents through the chromosomes passed onto their child. The 46 chromosomes (23 from each parent) have genes made up of DNA with instructions of what traits a child will inherit.
Eye color is determined by variations in a person's genes. Most of the genes associated with eye color are involved in the production, transport, or storage of a pigment called melanin. Eye color is directly related to the amount of melanin in the front layers of the iris.
Did Elizabeth Taylor have violet eyes? These days, thanks to colored contact lenses, anyone can have violet-colored eyes . Taylor didn't come by her purple peepers that way; the first tinted contact lenses weren't commercially available until 1983. Taylor's eye color was the real deal.
Likewise, two brown-eyed parents can have a child with blue eyes, although this is also uncommon.
There's a little genetic tweak that makes the combination of red hair and blue eyes the rarest of them all. The same Nature study mentioned above found that another gene variant, HERC2, interacts with both the MC1R gene and the OCA2 gene—and it can shut off the redhead gene while expressing blue eyes and blonde hair.