Eli5: My puppy and all 8 of her litter mates are jet black. Her mum and dad are brown and red respectively. How is this genetically possible?

Question

My understand of high school biology 15 years ago would tell me that the chance of all 8 having a recessive gene would be something like 1/56,000. What’s happened here?

In: Biology

Answer 1

High school biology acts like phenotypes and genotypes have a way simpler connection than they do. It’s very rarely only two alleles that control the way an animal or person looks, such as eye or hair color.