how can two blue eyed parents have kids with brown eyes?

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My parents both have blue eyes and my siblings and I all have brown eyes.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

One of the misconceptions here is how genetics is taught in early education. There seems to be an emphasis that because blue eyes are recessive, and you have both parents with the recessive gene, that they can only pass on the recessive gene, but this isn’t how it actually works.

Think of genes as a bowl of colored M&Ms. Your parents have a bowl each, and you will make your own bowl by grabbing a handful of candies from each of their bowls. Now your parents both have blue eyes, so a large majority of their M&Ms are blue, but because of their ancestry, they still have a lot of brown candies in the bowl.

So you come along, scoop out some candies from both parents, and as fortune has it, you just happened to grab a bunch of brown candies in each hand, even though chances were much better that you would have grabbed a majority of blue candies. Now, you will still probably also have grabbed some blue candies, and probably much much more than if your parents both had brown eyes; but, because you have so many more brown candies than blue, you have brown eyes.

This means that your kids will most likely have brown eyes, but still have a very good chance of having blue eyes (depending on their other parent’s contribution.)

Hopefully I made that simple enough without making it too inaccurate…

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