The laws of genetics state that eye color is inherited as follows: If both parents have blue eyes, the children will have blue eyes. The brown eye form of the eye color gene (or allele) is dominant, whereas the blue eye allele is recessive.
Your children inherit their eye colors from you and your 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. Every child carries two copies of every gene – one comes from mom, and the other comes from dad.
Both parents have to pass along the blue eye gene in order for their child to have blue eyes. That doesn't necessarily mean that the parents themselves have to have blue eyes; it's possible they carry the gene, but it is recessive. However, a blue-eyed child is almost certain if both parents have blue eyes.
If both the parents have brown eyes, then there is generally a 25% chance for their child to have blue eyes. Because both the brown-eyed parents have a recessive blue-eye gene and can pass it to the next generation. However, since eye color is polygenic, several other genes exert their effects as well.
Eye colour, or more correctly iris colour, is often used as an example for teaching Mendelian genetics, with brown being dominant and blue being recessive.
Since blue eyes are genetically recessive, only 8 percent of the world's population has blue eyes. While blue eyes are significantly less common than brown eyes worldwide, they are frequently found from nationalities located near the Baltic Sea in northern Europe.
There's a little genetic tweak that makes the combination of red hair and blue eyes the rarest of them all.
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.
The second-rarest eye color is hazel, a mixture of brown and green with golden flecks. About 18% of Americans have hazel eyes, compared with about 5% of the world's population.
Some seemingly impossible genetics can and do happen sometimes. This means that your kids might get your grandparent's darker eyes or hair even if you have kids with someone with blonde hair and blue eyes. It just would be much less likely than blonde haired, blue eyed kids.
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.
One parent with brown eyes and one parent with blue eyes: 50% chance of baby with brown eyes, 50% chance of baby with blue eyes, 0% chance of baby with green eyes.
Unlike nuclear DNA, which comes from both parents, mitochondrial DNA comes only from the mother.
Whether eyes are blue or brown, eye color is determined by genetic traits handed down to children from their parents. A parent's genetic makeup determines the amount of pigment, or melanin, in the iris of the his or her child's eye.
The inheritance of eye color is more complex than originally suspected because multiple genes are involved. While a child's eye color can often be predicted by the eye colors of his or her parents and other relatives, genetic variations sometimes produce unexpected results.
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.
What Bowie actually suffered from is called anisocoria: namely that one pupil was bigger than the other. It means that the iris - the coloured bit - can't react to light in the same way as its fellow, so the area appears to be darker. This means it looks like one eye is a different colour to the other.
The whites of your eyes (called the sclera) turn yellow when you have a condition called jaundice. The whites of your eyes might turn yellow when your body has too much of a chemical called bilirubin, a yellow substance that forms when red blood cells break down. Normally, it's not a problem.
Black hair and blue eyes is a much more rare combination than is blonde hair and blue eyes. The reason why these two traits are linked is that the genes responsible for hair and eye color happen to be close together on the same chromosomes.
Blonde fact #4: Not all blondes have blue eyes
The darker it is, the darker your tresses and your eyes. That's why so many people around the world have black strands and brown eyes. Lighter tint gives rise to lighter coloured eyes, including blue, but also varying tones of green and grey.
Approximately 8% to 10% of the global population have blue eyes. A 2002 study found that the prevalence of blue eye color among the white population in the United States to be 33.8% for those born from 1936 through 1951, compared with 57.4% for those born from 1899 through 1905.
Blue eyes are a fascinating and unique trait that can be found in many different parts of the world. Approximately 8% of the global population has blue eyes, with higher concentrations in certain countries such as Lithuania (95%), Finland and Estonia (89%) or the United States (16.6%).
Before that point, it was believed that most people had brown eyes. In the United States, blue eyes are becoming less common. In the 1950s, more than half the population had blue eyes. Now, it is estimated that one in six babies has blue eyes.
There are plenty of blue-eyed Asians. This probably happens when the traditional blue-eyed allele comes into a family from a (possibly very distant) European ancestor. Blue eyes then resurface in a child generations later if they inherit the allele from both parents.