To wonder at genetics

I’ll NC after this but you can see it was copy and paste minus the colouring!
me, my mum and her dad

I’m a redhead with green eyes, my mum was dark olive skin, brown eyes, black hair as is the rest of the family
we went to a family funeral and I looked like the odd one out

thought I was 100% British but went and did my DNA and found out my mums gg grandad was black

Just a discussion at lunch a few weeks ago by A Level Biology teachers about genetics which then progressed into more about the BRCA cancer and the liklihood of getting breast/ovarian cancer. I teach physics so was more interested about the skin melanin bit and hadn't linked it to eye colour so looked it up in a text book.

Did you just get the AI overview off Google by any chance? You might want to be a bit careful about that. A lot of what you've repeated said, whilst not entirely incorrect is a bit misleading. The basics of brown/not brown eye colour do indeed follow Mendalian genetics and the reason brown eyed parents can and do have blue'eyed children is not due to the expression of low pigment genes but due to the fact that lots of brown eyed people also carry a recessive blue eyed gene. When 2 such people have children the ration of brown to blue eyes is 3:1 as youd predict (bearing in mind d that (on average) 25% of the offspring will have inherited 2 brown eyed genes and 50% will inherit 1 brown eyed gene and still therefore have brown eyes.

If you want to look at hazel and green and grey and various shades of blue for eye colour then yes, more of the other genes come into play.

Actually I think that's quite outdated 1990s biology, and I'm sure I read that something like 15 genes are responsible for your eye colour.

One of the genes controls how much melanin (pigment) there is in the iris and more pigment means brown eyes.

So rather than the whole eye colour thing you inherit pigment amount. So two brown eyed parents can also carry the low pigment gene and hence have kids with blue eyes which is low pigment.

(and because of low pigment it also means blue eyes are way more sensitive to light! Same for low pigment skin being susceptible to burning in the sun. And why people who live in areas that have less sunlight were genetically more likely to have blue eyes which have less pigment as they don't have so much sunlight to deal with!).

I mentioned this earlier as in food preferences - inherited by a relative completely irrelevant to upbringing.

I do like seeing what my grandkids do similar to what my kids did - even when not their direct child. One seems to have inherited a great gran’s pout though - but not blood related, so guess that is nurture going on down - or just coincidence.

It's some of the other stuff is inherited. In family, on my dad's side we all sort of twiddle our feet to go to sleep.

Also it is not uncommon, after chemo, for hair to grow back a different colour. How does that happen?

My kids are not that clearly siblings, though not completely disparate. None look like me particularly as adults. What I have found though is that at certain stages of life they were so much like me, but it didn’t last! Eg I have an age 4 photo that everyone thought was my daughter, not I and similar for their sibling at a different age - very interesting how they just had that moment in time like me - maybe just to confirm they were mine before they changed!

Same w ds4. So much so that I'm glad his uncle was living on the other side of the world when he was conceived.

This is like me and my sister. Our dad isn't half Indian but he does have olive skin/dark hair/brown eyes. Our mum is pale and English rose-esque. My sister and I look nothing alike. She's even a good deal shorter than me as well.

My ds doesn’t look at all like his dad, he’s the spit of his uncle!!! (No).

There is a photo of my great great great grandfather that was taken in the 1870s.

You can't tell the difference between him and my uncle. It's absolutely uncanny.

More disturbing is the photo of my great grandmother which looks exactly like my mother. This great grandmother is on my PATERNAL side....

I know of boy girl siblings. He had dark hair, brown eyes and olive skin and his sister pale skin, blue eyes and blond hair.

It would start either a spontaneous gene mutation.

I know three couples who have a parent with red hair and a black parent and all eight kids have inherited the colouring of the white parent with the hair texture of the black parent.

It was difficult to see who my eldest son resembled when he was a baby.

Until one day when my mum had been organising some very old family photos and left some of them on the kitchen counter. My SIL noticed it when visiting and asked her where I had the 'olden day photo' of my son taken.

The man in the photograph was my great grandfather as a child. My son is a young adult now and the resemblance to my mum is clear.

I’m blue eyed blonde (even in my 60s) DSs father Brown eyed blonde (fairer than me) son was white haired with brown eyes. Now grown up he has very dark brown hair and brown eyes.

weird!

I have a hereditary medical condition - inherited from my DM via a dominant gene.
She generously passed it on to all my siblings too.
I presume, though don't know for sure, that she inherited it from her DM, as she died at a relatively young age.
What I'd like to know is, where does it start?
Someone in the dim and distant past had to be the first to start off this chain.

It always intrigues me that when a couple have very different colouring some will have children that all look alike (my friend jokes that she didn't have 3 children she just had the first one cloned as all three of hers look very similar, a half way between her small, fair hair, blue eyed look and his tall with almost black hair, brown eyed) while her sister has one 'mini me' and one that is the image of her DH so one tall, brown eyed straight dark brown haired child, one short, with blue eyes and curly light hair. I know the science involved but it always fascinates me that sometimes similar genes will produce a blend of the parents while other children look so strongly like one of their parents. Mine look very much like their dad in terms of shape of features, build etc but have my colouring. Looking as DS is like look at a picture of DH as a teen that has had the brown eyes swapped for blue and dark hair swapped for fair.

My olive skinned Spanish friend gave birth to a very pale, white haired, blue eyed baby with white eyelashes and as the midwife cut the cord she said suspiciously "are you sure this is your baby?"

I've got a random ginger child myself, with only a strawberry blonde uncle on my side and a ginger brother on DH's. None of my other children or any of the nieces and nephews are ginger either.

I'm South Asian, medium skin tone with jet black hair and eyebrows and brown eyes. My parents also have brown eyes but my younger brother has hazel eyes.

Married a british man with blue eyes and brown hair. His mum has blue eyes too and his dad green.

Our son has green eyes with a blue centre. He has dark brown hair and his skin is very milky coloured and pale in the winter and tanned in the summer. He has been mistaken for being Turkish even though my parents have mixed Pakistani/Afghan heritage. I also had a great grandfather who turned up in his village in Pakistan back in the day and never told anyone where he was from. I'd love to find out because that particular line of the family, whilst being born Pakistani, have different features.

My husbands family are so interesting too - mixed French and Scandinavian backgrounds on his mums side and english on his dad's.

Its so interesting.

I'm a mixed ethnicity person and both my parents are mixed as well, so there was quite a bit of 'which group brought in this' when I was young.

Some weird flukes of genetic with my kids:
My DD1 was born with a cluster of small dark moles, that as she grew merged together into one large mole that is identical to a birth mark I have. I now presume my birth mark formed the same way, no one ever discussed it.

My MIL was a third born child with eczema, my husband is a third born child with eczema and our third born child started having eczema when she was days old.

Same child was also born with thick red hair, like her father and grandmother, but it all fell out when she was about 4 months old and it grew back the same light brown colour her siblings have. In light dim enough that the red in my husband's hair is muted to a brown, they look like they have the same hair again (I have a few photos of this, I find it interesting).

My siblings and I look nothing alike. My children do not really look like their father or I, especially in skin tone or hair (I have charcoal-black hair, other than the greys), but they are nearly carbon copies of each other.

My dad has a little tiny bump on his right ear.
His mother had the same bump on her right ear.
I have exactly the same little bump on mine.
DS (only child) has the same bump in the same spot on his right ear.

DS is only 13 so we will have to wait, for a very long time hopefully, to find out if this continues for another generation.

My DS and her kids dont have it, but she favours my DM and I look more like my Dad.

DS is married to a twin, one of her sons looks almost identical to his cousin, but not very much like his brother, who looks more like me and my DS

Red hair colour is a recessive trait!

DS is the spit of my maternal GF - has his build and dark wavy hair and even his personality- even though my mum really doesn't look much like him at all and I look much more like my DF's side so those genes lurked around undetected for 3 generations and then popped up!