Paternity

hakenberg

I have a quest for you.

My wife has blue eyes her Mother and Father both have blue eyes

I have Green eyes My mother has Blue eyes my father has Green Eyes

We have one child with Blue eyes

We have another child with brown eyes.

Can someone find me a reason for my second child having Brown eyes.

Is it genetically impossible.

Suaimhneach

Em. No. Its not.
I really really dont think it is anyway.
As far as I know DNA is more complicated than just you and your mam and your mams mam etc.

It seems odd that you would have such doubt about your paternity... based on eye colour!

Pet

It's completely possible, through recessive genes and/or codominance of alleles.

However, if you're having doubts about paternity, then even this information will not be enough to reassure you. And for that, I can offer no advice.

hakenberg

Jesjes wrote:

Em. No. Its not.
I really really dont think it is anyway.
As far as I know DNA is more complicated than just you and your mam and your mams mam etc.

It seems odd that you would have such doubt about your paternity... based on eye colour!

Please Don't get me wrong

I find it ridiculous to believe my child is not mine.
I find it equally ridiculous to believe my wife has cheated

The Internet is an evil thing.

All sites I have visited say the probability of having a brown eyed child is 0%.

I do not have "Such a Doubt" it just bothers me

aidan_walsh

hakenberg wrote:

Please Don't get me wrong

I find it ridiculous to believe my child is not mine.
I find it equally ridiculous to believe my wife has cheated

The Internet is an evil thing.

All sites I have visited say the probability of having a brown eyed child is 0%.

I do not have "Such a Doubt" it just bothers me

The internet is the worlds greatest source of misinformation. Never forget that.

Nevyn

The blue over brown domainace for eyes does not always hold true.

secret_squirrel

Given that this is from the internet you may or may not find this of help.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_color#Determination_of_eye_color

If you want to find similar just try a google search on Brown Eyes Recessive.

aidan_walsh's caveat applies though.

Faith

Thaedydal wrote:

The blue over brown domainace for eyes does not always hold true.

Probably because it's not true. Brown is the dominant allele for eye colour.

OP, you have two alleles for eye colour. The dominant allele is the one that is expressed. Your alleles are either heterozygous or homozygous, meaning in you, for example, you either have two green alleles (homozygous) or a dominant green allele and a recessive allele (probably blue, meaning they're heterozygous). If somebody a few generations back in both your families had brown eyes, there is a small chance that that gene will be expressed in your child.

It's complicated to explain, but have a look here if you'd like a more detailed explanation.

Basically, yes, it's entirely possible and in fact very plausible.

Nevyn

lol

I got them turned arround,
cheers Faith.

Faith

Anytime! I might as well get some use out the fact that I study genetics .

embee

Of course its possible.

My parents both have blue eyes.

I have blue eyes.
My sister has grey eyes.
My brother has brown eyes.

biko

Wiki

humanji

I have a friend who's parents both have blue eyes and she says that all her grand parents did two. She has one green eye and the other's brown! :eek:

Black Swan

Genetics is very complex! You are talking in probabilities and not absolutes. You need to go back several generations, not just one or two.

LegacyUser

Don’t want to startle the poster just something i heard -

There was a thing on George Hook a few weeks back about this - there was a study in Sweden that found that men choose Blue eyed women as partners / wives !!!

The guy on the radio who conducted the study was a genetics professor he said the reason for this is that if both parents are blue eyed then the children have to be blue eyed therefore the men can have complete trust that the wife has been faithful .... in so far as they know the kids are theirs

I don’t know how true or false this is but this was the claim made by the professor.

Going Demented

My mother has blue eyes. My biological father has green eyes.
I have green and brown eyes.

TheBlock

I have green Eyes and my wife has blue eyes...

My wife said that was the reason our son looked like the Milkman.

Oryx

I have blonde hair. My husband has brown hair. Our son has red hair. Does this mean I slept with the red-headed postman? No.

Joking aside, genetics and heredity is a complex thing. Kids come out with all kinds of combinations of looks, eye colour and personality traits. Sometimes they look like us, or a grandparent, or an uncle.... depending on what genetic mix they happened to get. I think its entirely possible a brown eyed gene going back thru your family has cropped up again.

Nevyn

The rate at which paternity turns out to be wrongfully assumed is not as much as people think.

http://www.canadiancrc.com/articles/Globe_and_Mail_Moms_Little_secret_14DEC02.htm

It's now widely accepted among those who work in genetics that roughly 10 per cent of us are not fathered by the man we believe to be dad.
Geneticists have stumbled upon this phenomenon in the course of conducting large population studies and hunting for genes that cause diseases such as cystic fibrosis. They find full siblings to be half-siblings, fathers who are genetic strangers to more than one of their children and uncles who are much closer to their nieces and nephews than anyone might guess. Lumped under the heading of "pedigree errors," these so-called mis-paternities, false paternities and non-paternities are all science jargon for the unwitting number of us who are chips off someone else's block.

We throw the dice when we consieve and you never know when your maternal great aunts nose will appear on your child and no one else in the current generation yours or the childs will have it.

josephine20

Can you see any of your child in yourself? In my opinion...mostly gotten from Jeremy Kyle... if a person can't see any of their child in themselves then there's a chance they might not be theirs. Yeah its so easy to get worried about stuff you read on the net. You better be careful about accusing your wife of cheating though. She is so not going to be impressed... that's if it's not true of course.

Faith

Ah, come on now. The OP came here looking for reassurance that it's genetically possible for his child to have brown eyes and now people are asking him to question his paternity entirely!

Yes, it's genetically possible, I've already explained how (and I'm studying genetics) and that's that. End of story.

katiegordon

bb& bb bb &G (bG)
bb & Gb
bb Bb
Im only a LC student but based one my understanding its not possible!sorry!
All of your wifes family are homogenousie all genes are the same eg. bb(as the b=blue gene is recessive) so your wife must give each of your children a b gene.

Your mother had to have given you a b(again she is homogenous)
your father had to have given you at least one G and the other could be another G or a b (as G is dominant over b)
As you have green eyes you therefore are Gb (b from your mother G from your father)
Your wife and you give one gene each, she had to geve a b and you could give a G or b.
Therefore its impossible for u to have a brown eyed child!
sorry!I could be wrong and theres always genetic mutation!

Pet

Not to sound like an arrogant prick, but Faith is studying genetics in university and has already pointed out it's possible, as have I..btw, it's "homozygous", not "homogenous", and it IS possible - read up on codominance and incomplete dominance.

Talliesin

One of the things about science is that certain concepts are easier to explain by explaining a deeply simplified (in many cases "deeply simplified" really means "completely wrong") version of it and then building on that knowledge.

What you learn about eye colour and genes in secondary school is an example of this. It's pretty handy to take some of the genes that affect eye-colour in order to demonstrate the way recessive and dominant genes interact, and it's a bit easier for people to relate to than mutated fruitflies, but it is in fact not actually true at all.

Hence you progress through the following stages of knowledge:

No knowledge

Eye colour is something to do with your parents.

Brown eye genes dominate over blue eyes <-- katiegordon's level of knowledge, and I suspect the OP's when he started this thread.

It's not as simple as that <-- my level of knowledge

Actually knowing how it works <-- Faith's level of knowledge

Faith's the one for the OP to pay the most attention to as to his direct question of "is it genetically impossible".

katiegordon

oops sorry!really disqualified my answer with the whole homogenous thing didnt I?!lol thats what ya get for half listening in class i suppose!!I get what you mean about the hole levels of learning thing though, this would be a step up from JC level.Its quite frustrating though and difficult when teachers say basically forget what you were thought before, it wasnt true!!exremely hard to get your head around that imo

Talliesin

Yep, and if you go on to study science in college you'll hear it some more about what you're learning now.

Could be worse, could be physics...

Nevyn

And eye colours does change over the last 6 months my 6 year olds eyes have been getting darker and with more threads of brown in the blue green.

Esel

Unreg25 wrote:

Don’t want to startle the poster just something i heard -

There was a thing on George Hook a few weeks back about this - there was a study in Sweden that found that men choose Blue eyed women as partners / wives !!!

The guy on the radio who conducted the study was a genetics professor he said the reason for this is that if both parents are blue eyed then the children have to be blue eyed therefore the men can have complete trust that the wife has been faithful .... in so far as they know the kids are theirs

I don’t know how true or false this is but this was the claim made by the professor.

Good logic there - if there are no other blue-eyed men around.

The Sweeper

Blue eyed women? In Sweden? Never. Isn't that a Hispanic country?

The_Conductor

Talliesin wrote:

Yep, and if you go on to study science in college you'll hear it some more about what you're learning now.

Could be worse, could be physics...

Yep- but at least Physics deals in absolutes, rather than statistical probabilities

OP- genetics are a random statistical occurence. When you start to discuss statistics- it rapidly becomes apparent that there is no such thing as 100% positive or 0% negative- there always tends to be factors, however remote, that can affect these things.

Genetics are also a developing science- it is only this year for example that Gregor Mendel's experiments with peas has been shown to be circumspect. When he tried to do similar experiments with primroses they failed altogether. There is no iron-clad guarantee after all that discrete genes are definitively going to be inherited. The veracity of his work has been debated for over 50 years (for example)

As Faith has pointed out- it is entirely possible that your children may have brown eyes, the probability may be higher that they have blue eyes, but it is entirely possible nonetheless.

Faith

Unreg25 wrote:

The guy on the radio who conducted the study was a genetics professor he said the reason for this is that if both parents are blue eyed then the children have to be blue eyed therefore the men can have complete trust that the wife has been faithful .... in so far as they know the kids are theirs

I don’t know how true or false this is but this was the claim made by the professor.

This isn't necessarily true either. The allele for blue eyes is generally recessive to every other allele for eye colour, so the gene for blue eyes will only be expressed in the person if the alleles are homozygous. Blue eyes are relatively rare, and are really only a Caucasion feature. So if both parents were homozygous for blue eyes, yes their child would most likely have blue eyes. However, there's still plenty of room for variation if one, or both of the parents have heterozygous alleles.