To wonder at genetics

[TwittleBee]

Does anyone else wonder where you or another family member got their genetics?

I sometimes wonder about our son; where did he get his skin tone, hair and eye colour.

He is the only one of us to have straight hair with brown eyes and olive skin. He is almost all one colour, sort of this dark gold.

Meanwhile the rest of us are all curly haired, green/blue eyes with freckles with pale skin (including extended family on both sides)

The one thing my son and I do share is our eyes, we both have epicanthal folds and I always wonder where we got those as no one in my family has them.

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?

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.

Actually I think that's quite outdated 1990s biology, and I'm sure I read that something like 15 genes are responsible for your eye colour.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

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.

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.

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

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

Genetics are fascinating. My now ex and I used to joke when the DC were small that we had "his and hers" babies. DS1 has my colouring, and DS2 his dads. Only now they are adults DS1 is the spitting image of his father, albeit with my colouring. And DS2 looks so much like me that the computer often thinks we're the same person. But his hair is closer in colour to his Dad.

Actually, the genes on their Dad's side of the family are so strong that you can tell all the cousins are related. Other than DS2 that is. If I wasn't 10000000% certain that his Dad really is his Dad I'd question his parentage tbh!

Genetics are so amazing. I’m technically mixed race as I have a white great grandparent, you can’t tell with me I look pure Gilgit, but a sibling looks white you wouldn’t think they were part Asian.

Our children are mixed race, we know one of their ethnicities, one looks very much like ethnicity one, the other looks more South Asian. It will be interesting if their second ethnicity appears more as they get older. If either of them ever decide to do an ancestry test that will be very interesting.

My husbands Swedish and South African Dutch, he is the spitting image of his Swedish great grandfather, the only person in the family who looks like him at all, you wouldn’t even know he is related to his parents from looks. He is very pale skinned, blonde and blue eyed, his little brother is dark skinned white, curly black hair and brown eyes, like the majority of the family. If it wasn’t for great grandad you’d be wondering if he was an affair baby. It would be really interesting to see what our dna would look like combined.

My Nan, Mum, sister, niece (from my other sister) and cousin are literally copy and paste of each other - it’s so bizarre. We had a picture of my Nan at a wedding when she was younger and my daughter said can Aunty time travel.

I have a friend who parents are Dad Chinese and Mum white-British - the son is the image of his Dad and my friend is her Mum double - you wouldn’t know she was mixed.

I don't think food tastes can be genetic? My dad was the fussiest eater ever, and my mum will eat absolutely anything. I don't think I'm that fussy.

I absolutely despise raw tomatoes and she adores them. In fact I dislike or am not bothered with most of the foods my mum loves.

That doesn't show that food tastes arent genetic as we don't inherit all of our parents genetic characteristics.

I've just never heard anyone say they were before. The food my great grandparents liked would be different to what I like because they only had seasonal foods and McDonald's etc hadn't been invented. So I don't see how you would know if it was genetic or not?

I’m not a geneticist or scientist but this situation where a child very obviously had their father’s food tastes really struck me and has made me wonder about it - I don’t think it’s important particularly to be checked/verified, but it also made me consider how much of ‘us’ is defined by heredity rather than ‘self’.

It may I think be a part of more important genes that feed into obesity though - taste preferences or reasons for wanting/needing high sugar, or high fat - maybe I’ll find out via any research on this whether it’s a thing or was coincidence.

That strikes me as being ND related (a very restrictive diet) and the child having the same ND as the adult so also having very restricted diet rather than it being taste that is genetic but obviously I have no idea if this is the case here.

That’s interesting, thank you, but equally and unfortunately I can’t know either - I knew the father who didn’t strike me that way but not well enough to know really and child ditto.

It was just so marked it stuck with me - I’m also adopted so have a general interest and have seen a geneticist when in my 50s due to family history I was told then - so all very interesting but don’t know or follow it all up much.

I have I think heard of tastes/diets being studied for obesity links but again I didn’t follow it up, but maybe this too could be linked to differing types of brain rather than specifically taste.

Thank you. Yeah it would be interesting to know if there is anything in it. It might be hard to say how much is nature v nurture. As in some families might not give their kids access to a wide range of healthy foods or some might ban sugar and upf entirely.

I'm tall. Nobody in my family is tall. Not my parents, grandparents (when they were alive), siblings. Even my own children aren't tall (they're adults), even though me and their dad were. I don't understand it at all. I wish I was shorter, I hate it!

Recessive genes. Two brown eyed right handed parents here with two blue eyed left handed children
DS2 looks like his great-great-uncle and like absolutely noone else in the extended or historic family.

Wow your daughter's eyes are a gorgeous colour!

My parents both have quite an olive skin tone - tan very easily and very evenly. My brother and I both have extremely pale white skin than burns rather than tans 😭

On my mother's side, there's a really strong set of genes that's come down from my great-grandmother. Out of about 30-40 descendents, only one or two don't strongly resemble that female line with a few token features of the fathers.

My son is the dead spit of me. His dad's features are his toes, his fingernails and the shape of his back.

My friends comment on how they've never seen a stronger mum-son resemblance, but in my family it's totally standard.

School eye colour lessons are very over simpified.

Genetics of Eye Color

What blows my mind is how I may not be gentically related to ancestors beyond I think grandparents as it's random which bits you get so it's possible to get nothing from an ancestor.

I think it's unlikely to not have some greatgrandparent DNA but possible and further back nothing at all gets more common. I know that why they look at Y and X chromosomes for ancestor DNA but it still blows my mind.

My daughter is good friends with a set of twin girls who look absolutely NOTHING alike. Truly completely different - one has darker Asian skin and eye colouring and thick black wavy hair, the other has much paler skin colour with light brown straight fine hair. Honestly, if you saw them together you wouldn't even think they are related, but they are actually twin sisters.

I don't think food tastes can be genetic?

Partly I think - super tatsers are a know thing having higher density of taste buds on the tongue and opposite poor tasters also have genetic compnemets - sometime with taste buds sometimes with smell issues.

Only a section of the population can famoulsy smell cyanide - it's a common plot point in histrocial murder plots - and even in cats I think 20% don't react to cat nip.

However food is complex - it's partly what we've learnt and also childhood associations so memory in there.