Posted on 10/23/2006 9:03:42 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Blue-eyed men prefer blue-eyed women, apparently because eye color can help reveal whether their partner has been faithful, researchers said on Monday.
"Before you request a paternity test, spend a few minutes looking at your child's eye color," Bruno Laeng and colleagues at the University of Tromso in Norway said in the study.
Under the laws of genetics, two parents with blue eyes will always have blue-eyed children, it said. So a blue-eyed man can know his blue-eyed wife or partner has cheated on him if their child has brown eyes.
"Blue-eyed men may have unconsciously learned to value a physical trait that can facilitate recognition of own kin," the scientists said in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.
The scientists asked 88 students to rate the attractiveness of models based on pictures manipulated so that half of them had blue eyes and the other half had brown eyes. The blue-eyed men in the group showed a preference for blue-eyed women.
But brown-eyed men, who cannot find any clues about paternity from a child's eye color, had no preferences by eye color. Women showed no preference for brown- or blue-eyed men, irrespective of their own eye color.
A quarter of children born to two brown-eyed parents who have both brown and blue-eye genes among their ancestors will have blue eyes. The rest will be brown.
In a second study, 443 young adults of both sexes were asked about the eye color of their partners -- blue-eyed men were also the group with the highest proportion of partners with the same eye color.
You can still see it if you use the wayback machine
That link'll get you comments 1-250, you'll have to finagle the rest of the pages yourselves.
I laughed to hard during that thread, I saved them on the spot as .mht files, I just knew it would be a classic.
Ahhh..the good 'ole days...
No speck of brown. Very bright blue eyes, just like mine.
That, my friend, is what is called HAZEL.
Her eyes are blue. Never mind the recessive gene, the actual color when you look at them is blue. Sure there is the brown gene, but the color is blue. I am not going to call something blue hazel.
My main objection to your utterly offensive remarks were your sick imputations against my brother in law. You owe me and my family an apology for that. You had no right to throw out those sick Hillary-esque statements about my brother in law apparently needing to study science based on incorrect assumptions about my sister. He never HAD any incorrect assumptions. But you sure did. And you owe us all an apology for your offensive, despicable accusation which is an insult in the truest sense of the word.
If you can't handle a joke, this is not the place for you.
That, or adjust your medications.
Kitten wasn't the only one offended.
When you start saying the only way to get brown eyes from a blue-eyed parent is for infertility, that's pretty awful.
Eye color is very subjective (and dependent on skin/hair color) and patterns vary.
In rare cases, melanin (the brown) can be there and be overpowered by the blue, so while a person is genetically a "hazel," they appear to be a true blue.
Here is a heredity predictor based on a blue-eyed mom, an alleged blue-eyed dad, and a brown-eyed child --- the result being that the alleged father is "likely excluded" as the father. (You can play with the various iternations of this calculator.)
http://genetree.com/resource/CalculatorResults.php?T=2
See the caculator linked below.
Yes, strange things happen --- like a mutation.
But a TRUE blue --- with all four allels being blue --- almost always results in a blue-eyed child. Period.
The simplest, easiest, explanation is the most likely: the eyes are genetically hazel, appearance notwithstanding.
Sorry bad link --- linked to results.
http://genetree.com/resource/eyeColorCalculator.php
Here is a comprehensive calculator:
http://genetree.com/resource/traitsPaternityTest.php
Lamarck was right!
Now you're a doctor? Up from "scientist"? And now you are prescribing 'meds'? How interesting! There you go again, assuming away.
A bit of advice for you: Never ASSUME - you make an A-S-S out of U and me.
No, you weren't joking, you were making a long hysterical 'scientific' lecture that had nothing to do with the issue at hand which was your insult against my family and now you are pretending you were making a joke.
Why did you single out my brother in law? I named five people in a description debunking some research about blue eyed men seeking blue eyed women and you singled him out for very seedy, sleazy reasons that were not jokes. But I know what you meant.
You owe me and my family an apology. Be a man about it and give it. Real men do that. Maggots never do.
Righteous yellow is uncommon. Hazel--light brown--is not uncommon.
If you would look on the web you would find out that there are at this time actually 3 genes responsible for eye color.
It is not as simple as you claim it to be.
http://www.seps.org/cvoracle/faq/eyecolor.html
Here's some more information:
http://www.thetech.org/genetics/ask.php?id=126
"It may be that hazel eyes are the result of genes different from gey and bey2. Something like hey for hazel. And maybe hey is a bit like bey2 and gey in that it comes in two forms—one that makes enough melanin for hazel eyes (H) and one that makes little or no melanin (b).
If this were true, the scheme for eye color would have to be changed. In the new scheme, you would have brown eyes if you had B, hazel eyes if you had H but not B, green eyes if you had G but not H or B and blue eyes if you only had b.
My gut tells me this probably isn’t the answer. Even though this sounds pretty complex, it seems like it wouldn’t be that much harder to tease out than green and brown eyes. So it is probably something else.
Another possibility is a variation on this theme. Maybe hazel eyes come from different versions of bey2 or gey. I said at the outset that there were two versions of each gene. But what if there were more? What if there were many versions that result in the various shades of color we see?
This is certainly plausible and some recent research suggests that this might be part of the story. But again, I’m just not sure. I would think the genetics again would be easy enough that it would have been figured out by now.
Another possibility is that there may be modifier genes. These are genes that would affect how much melanin bey2 or gey make. For example, you could get a gene that has gey make more melanin or bey2 make less. The end result would be hazel eyes.
What might this inheritance pattern look like? Pretty complicated.
Before launching into this, we need to remember one more thing. We have two copies of most of our genes—one from mom and one from dad. What this means is that there are actually a number of ways of combining genes to end up with various eye colors"
Wow, you are insane.
Why did you single out my brother in law?
What are you talking about?
Laughing.
I am sorry I offended you. To answer your question, "why did I single out your brother in law," I turn to the original post:
"My sister has blue eyes and so does her husband. But her son has brown eyes and it's because one of her parents (my dad) had brown eyes."
The reason I "singled out" your brother-in-law is because he is the (genetically speaking, this is not a dispersion) merely the "alleged" father.
Biologically speaking, barring IVF egg switch, the woman KNOWS she is the mother. A man BELIEVES (with good reason) he is the father.
Yes, you mentioned four people (five by implication): sister, B-I-L, son, grandfather, and (by implication) grandmother.
Sister = bb (or, in my opinion, bB, being a Hazel)
BIL = bb (or possibly bB, being a Hazel)
Son = Bb (or maybe even BB, if Sister and BIL were Hazel)
Grandfather = BB or Bb --- both resulting in brown
Grandmother (by implication) = bb or bB
Now, your BIL is "singled out" because he's the only one who could be "in play." (The grandfather could, too, but it's not relevant --- again, talking biology here, not family dynamics.)
If sister was a bb and BIL was was bb, and the child was a Bb (brown), then something happened.
A "B" came from somewhere.
To quote the calculator above, the BIL is "likely excluded" from being the father.
Since you are sure of fidelity (and I have no reason to doubt), there are only a couple of things that could have occurred: (1) a one-in-a-million alignment of allels or MORE LIKELY (2) one or both of the parents --- probably your sister given your father's brown --- eyes is really a hazel, albeit a hazel that strongly favors blue.
That's it. Yes, it was flip and short (and hence this LONG post to prevent further misunderstanding), and for that I am sorry.
But the science is sound.
It is a very, very, unlikely event to get a brown-eyed son from two truely blue-eyed parents.
Only one problem, I haven't learned how to put a space between the words when they're in color.
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