As a green eyed person, I’m curious about this. Brown eyes are dominant and blue eyes are recessive, so how would green eyes be classified?
In: Biology
I think that they’ve moved away from labeling eye color as a single gene trait, and it’s believed to involve multiple genes, meaning eye color can’t as easily be labeled as purely dominant or purely recessive anymore. That being said, it’s probably still true in most cases that brown is dominant, green is recessive, and blue is recessive. I know that blue is recessive to green as well. So green is still considered recessive, it’s just dominant over blue.
And yes, it is a mutation. I believe it involves the same mutated protein that makes blue eyes appear blue. It’s why some people can have eyes that are blue-green, or even eyes that seem blue in some light and seem green in other lights.
Eye color isn’t that simple, there’s multiple genes which control it but everything is a genetic mutation.
Having 5 fingers is a genetic mutation and at one point wasn’t the norm for our ancient ancestors.
green eyes are not a genetic mutation, but rather a variation that occurred when a population migrated from one region to another years and years ago.
“is it a mutation” isn’t really a meaningful question. Everything started out as a mutation, and some of those mutations propagate through the gene pool. At this point, you’re going to be getting your green eyes from a parent who has genes for green eyes, not from a mutation that occurred between your parents and you.
It seems that brown eyes are somewhat dominant over all other colors, but it’s not as simple as Mendel wanted it to be
There is actually no eye ‘colour’.
All eyes are just different densities of brown and scatter of light causes the blues and greens. Thinner iris tissue allows for the scatter to occur, but there is no such thing as blue pigment in the eye or green pigment. Every one has the same brown pigment in the iris, just different density of brown
Technically, everything is a genetic mutation. Life started out as single-celled organisms.
My biology teacher said it was blue/recessice and brown/dominant, but she said that eye colour is also affected by stuff that happens in the womb, that’s why it’s not just two distinct eye colours for humankind, but a ton of variations in shades. Greens, greys, blues are inherited blue genes plus the intrauterine stuff. (She was more eloquents, but it was 20 years ago, and I’d rather not misquote her.)
That said, I googled it a few years ago, when I was pregnant, and nowadays we know that it’s multiple genes at work, and two even blue-eyed parents can have brown eyed children (though it’s very, very rare).
In short, it’s complicated. 🙂
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