Blonde + Redhead = ???

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Blonde hair and red hair are recessive traits, meaning that they require two homozygous recessive alleles to be expressed (in this case, bb or rr). What hair color would the child of a blonde and redhead have since there is a 100% chance of them being br? Would one recessive allele dominate over the other? Are there real life examples of blonde + redhead and what were the resulting children?

I am absolutely not a scientist/geneticist so please be correct any factual inaccuracies I may have made!!

In: Biology

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The notion of recessive traits is a gross oversimplification.

To offer a slightly less simplified explanation which is still not telling the whole story: the genes for red and blond are separate things. You can have both the genes for blond, and the genes for red. In fact you can have the genes for black hair and the genes for red. The red hair genes are a separate thing that makes hair redder then the normal hair color would be based on the other genes.

This generally means that it’s only noticeable for people that have both blond hair genes and the red hair genes, because otherwise you can’t really see the redness. This makes red hair genes slightly different than the “recessive” trait that they teach in schools. Its effect can get covered up rather than replaced entirely.

So in this case your talking about 2 people that both have blond genes, one of which also has red. The result will be someone with red hair.

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