how is it that characteristics (like blue eyes or blonde hair or dark skin, etc, can "skip" generations?

Question

for example, 2 parents with dark hair can produce a child with red hair? can a feature be carried in the genes for several generations without actually "apperaring" in an offspring until many years down the gene chain?

Answer 1

Yeah its possible, its all to do with recessive and dominant genes. It awful to explain though, so try these websites.
http://student.biology.arizona.edu/sciconn/heredity/worksheet_heredity.html
http://www.blinn.edu/socialscience/LDThomas/Feldman/Handouts/0203hand.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recessive_gene
There are loads of others, if you just type recessive and dominat gene in the search box.

Answer 2

lets say the mother is carrying a red head gene (the reccessive) and a dark hair gene (the dominant). the father also has the same. now lets call the red head gene X and the dark hair gene Y. because the Y gene is dominant, there is a 75% chance (roughly) that the child will get it. now, because there are 2 parents, that means that there is a 150/200 chance of Y being dominant and 50/200 chance of X being dominant. this is equal to 75%Y and 25% X. this is the same with most other genes apparently. hope that helps!

Answer 3

Yep. As long as that child recieves the recessive gene. If you child had a gene for red hair and has brown hair and he marries someone with the same recessive gene, they could end up with a Red head...or a ginger as they are called.

Answer 4

Because of the difference in dominant and recessive alleles. You can have two brown hair brown eyed parents and have a blonde with blue eyes, it is all a matter of which genes carrying which alleles are selected during the mitosis process.

Answer 5

variations are frequently greater desirable interior peoples than between peoples. subsequently, it is not all that unusual as an Irish guy or woman which you have dark brown, even curly hair on the same time as your kinfolk look distinctive with gentle brown hair and doubtless another characteristics too. Many Irish people even have dark blond hair and brown eyes besides to blue-gray eyes, and a honest form of them have reddish hair of a few form. yet, if one looks at people in countries the place the dissimilar nearer genetic kinfolk of the Irish stay like Iceland, Norway, Finland, Latvia and Poland one sees those with those comparable combos of pigmentation, hair colour and eye colour too. There are gentle and dark Norwegians, gentle and dark Poles, or perhaps some Finns with blue-gray eyes or reddish hair and so on.

Answer 6

You have 2 alleles for each physical trait you have (phenotype).
Your genotype is the actual alleles you carry.
Homozygous = 2 of the same alleles present
Heterzygous = 2 different alleles present
There are dominant alleles & recessive alleles.
Blue eyes is a recessive allele, meaing if it is paired up with a dominant one like brown eyes, you will only show brown eyes. However, you still carry a blue eye allele
ex:
b = blue eyes (recessive)
B = brown eyes (dominant)
if you have one blue eye allele and one brown eye allele you are Bb. you have brown eyes
2 Brown alleles would be BB (you have brown eyes), 2 blue alleles would be bb (you have blue eyes, because no dominant brown present)
Ex 1: If someone who is Bb has offspring with someone who is bb, the children would take one allele from each parent, the results would be:
Bb, Bb, bb, bb (4 combinations of genes)
50% chance brown eyed heterzygous, 50% chance blue eyed homozygous
Ex 2: if the parents, instead, were Bb x Bb, the children would be:
BB, Bb, Bb, bb
25% Brown eyed homozygous, 50% brown eyed heterozygous, 25% blue eyed homozygous
Ex 3: bb x bb parents, children are:
bb, bb, bb, bb
100% blue eyed homozygous....works the same if you have 2 homozygous brown eyed parents (BB) except you get 100% brown eyed children.
You can see from ex 2 that two heterzygous brown eyed parents (Bb), have a 25% chance of having a blue eyed child.

Answer 7

yup. for example blue eyes are considered a recessive trait, meaning both sets of genes, one from each parent, have to be for that gene or the eyes won't be blue. so you could have two parents who each received the blue eyes gene from one of their parents but who do not have blue eyes themselves each passing along the gene for blue eyes to their offspring. It can get more complicated than that, but yes, traits can skip multiple generations even before showing up in somebody.

Answer 8

maybe, but i'd say that it's quite uncommon. of course it could be the case that one of the parents (mother) may be having an affair with another man with red hair and the father knows nothing about it and then many years later when the father is uncertain about him actually being a father, he takes a DNA test and finds out that he's not the childs father. But then they find a match for the DNA. A man who contributed to the sperm bank multiple times. The `fathers` best friend. A big confrontation then ensues in which case the `not-so-very-dad` kills his best friend and gets a jail sentence for twenty years. Twenty years later he is released and unleashes his fury on his wife and her new husband, his father, thus killing them and then commiting suicide.

Answer 9

for me it depends upon the girl. Like I might notice a girl with black hair and also think she is totally hot however see a girl with blond hair that is meh and vice versa.

Answer 10

I was born along with blonde hair so i think i actually look fine thats the way i actually was born