whats the history on blue eyes?

Question

I am just curious because a friend I work with said that it meant that there had to have been i ncest somewhere in the family tree. Is that true.

Answer 1

I read recently that all Northern European people are descended from 16 males and 19 females, who entered Europe more than 40,000 years ago. So there must have been some inbreeding going on at least to some degree. But according to friends I have in West Virginia, this is not as big of a problem as it might seem at first glance, and it does tend to concentrate certain desirable traits such as blue eyes in the population, as long as you can overlook the six fingers.....

Answer 2

Many people have blue eyes who were not the product of incest. Anyway, blue eyes are a recessive trait. We have 3 different alleles that code for eye color, and what they really code for is for pigment to enter the iris of the eye.

The dominant eye color is brown, next is hazel (which can manifest as hazel, green, or grey, depending on how the pigment is displayed in the iris of the eye), and blue is recessive. So, a person carrying the gene for blue eyes might not display blue eyes because they also carry one of the other two alleles (like brown or hazel), and since those colors are dominant, they will be displayed. If two parents with brown eyes, also carry the gene for blue, they can have a blue-eyed child.

I think your friend was just teasing you because some recessive genetic disorders tend to run in families with incest, since the same genes keep getting past around. Blue eyes, however, would not be considered a genetic disorder, and many people have them. So, basically, it is not true what your friend said.

Answer 3

Funny answers folks. When you talk of eye color.... the most recent findings that I have seen say that eye color is actually dictated by *at least* four different genes (bits of chromosomes). The basic eye colors if I'm not mistaken are blue, brown, green. All shades and variations come from these three colors. Think of brown as the strongest, green in the middle, and blue as the weakest. Blue eyes "simply" means that the gene for brown or green is not there. It has nothing to do with incest. If dad has brown eyes and mom has brown eyes, they can both pass down the blue gene (which is hidden because brown is stronger) to their kids. If this is the case the child will have blue eyes. Kinda like Forest Gump -- "Eye color is like a box of chocolates.. ya never know what you're gonna get."

Surf the web and look for websites on "Dominant vs. Recessive Traits"

Answer 4

well, your friend could actually be right in a way. Blue eye color is a recessive trait. Recessive traits appear in a generation when there is a genetic predominance of a recessive trait in a family. Your friend could be right because recessive traits appear in same family union since the chances of acquiring recessive traits is much higher due to the fact that dominant traits which could mask the effects of recessive traits are more often than not absent.

Answer 5

Your friend is wrong...who told her that!! Blue eyes are resessive, meaning the person that has them received a resessive gene from each of their parents.

Answer 6

yea bird girl is right that person had to get a gene passed on from their parents