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.
When folks see the little boy my wife and I (who both have blue eyes) recently adopted from Russia they always comment on how he looks like us - but his eyes are brown. Fortunately we aren't planning on concealing his adoption from him, otherwise the gig would be up the minute he started learning about dominant and recessive alleles in biology.
a) did not actually depict CGEB itself and
b) was, in fact, a transvestite.
The profile page is still up, sans the pic, BTW.
CGEB, you still lurking?
LOL.
What I meant was, you'd have to be second generation double-blue for this article to be accurate, right?
Otherwise, a kid with brown eyes could just be a recessive trait, not proof of infidelity?
Enquiring minds ... I thought for sure that critter had been banned.
Child 1: hazel eyes
Child 2: brown eyes
Child 3: blue eyes
Child 1, 2, and 3 all looked *identical* at various parts of their young lives (the chubby baby stage), but their faces changed as they aged.
The same parents can produce very different kids. I've seen families where the boys were handsome and the girls were plain, or vice versa. Just depended on which features decided to show up!
This is rubbish.
My parents both have blue eyes, but one of my brothers doesn't.
That's because we have ancestors that also have brown eyes.
My daughters have blue eyes like me. My husband has brown eyes. However, his dad has blue eyes.
My daughters could have kids with brown eyes even if they marry someone with blue eyes.
Apparently not. Though I've heard rumors Laz was dating her. ;o)
My parents were both blond-haired blue eyes, and their son was red-headed blue-eyed. Also, my cousin was red-headed and blue-eyed even though her parents weren't. I guess we had some red-headed ancestors.
Too many dates with Rosie.
My sister and her husband both have blue eyes and brown hair. Their son is a freckled redhead. Recessive gene they both apparently carry, or is my sister not telling me something?
Rosie Palms or Rosie O'Donut?
Dating the former makes you go blind. Or so they tell me.
Dating the latter would make my stomach flash red and go around in circles.
Yes. A beige-yellow. And I kid you not, their last name was Wolf.
At one time scientists thought that a single gene pair, in a dominant/recessive inheritance pattern, controlled human eye color. The allele for brown eyes was considered dominant over the allele for blue eyes. The genetic basis for eye color is actually far more complex. At the present, three gene pairs controlling human eye color are known. Two of the gene pairs occur on chromosome pair 15 and one occurs on chromosome pair 19. The bey 2 gene, on chromosome 15, has a brown and a blue allele. A second gene, located on chromosome 19 (the gey gene) has a blue and a green allele. A third gene, bey 1, located on chromosome 15, is a central brown eye color gene.
Geneticists have designed a model using the bey 2 and gey gene pairs that explains the inheritance of blue, green and brown eyes. In this model the bey 2 gene has a brown and a blue allele. The brown allele is always dominant over the blue allele so even if a person is heterozygous (one brown and one blue allele) for the bey 2 gene on chromosome 15 the brown allele will be expressed. The gey gene also has two alleles, one green and one blue. The green allele is dominant to the blue allele on either chromosome but is recessive to the brown allele on chromosome 15. This means that there is a dominance order among the two gene pairs. If a person has a brown allele on chromosome 15 and all other alleles are blue or green the person will have brown eyes. If there is a green allele on chromosome 19 and the rest of the alleles are blue, eye color will be green. Blue eyes will occur only if all four alleles are for blue eyes. This model explains the inheritance of blue, brown and green eyes but cannot account for gray, hazel or multiple shades of brown, blue, green and gray eyes. It cannot explain how two blue-eyed parents can produce a brown-eyed child or how eye color can change over time. This suggests that there are other genes, yet to be discovered, that determine eye color or that modify the expression of the known eye color genes.
That is to say, two blue-eyed parents producing a brown-eyed child is unexplainable with our current knowledge of genetics. A zebra hunt, perhaps?
Awwww, sounds like you to are a perfect match! Catherine Zeta will be heartbroken, Pissy! :P
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