Hey there, I was just watching a YouTube video explaining the chances/possible out comes of children’s eye color based on their parents. It said if one parent has green and the other brown the chance for blue eyes is around 12% however all my siblings and I have blue eyes. My mother has green eyes while my father has one brown and one green. I tried googling but got no answers. So does his heterochromia affect eye color probability different or is it the same chances and they just got “lucky”? Thank you!
In: Biology
Heterochromia iridium is not a singular disorder. It is just a description of a symptom that may present as a result of many different syndromes; whether [congenital or acquired](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterochromia_iridum#Classification).
With Heterochromia iridium, there is an affected eye that usually does not reflect the genetics of the person, the color is simply caused by the condition itself.
It’s impossible to be sure due to not knowing the specifics of your fathers condition, but it’s likely that your father has a recessive blue allele. This would mean that likely both your mother and father have a recessive blue allele and a dominant brown/green allele, thus giving a 25% chance for blue eyes in their children.
It’s a heck of a lot more complex then we thought even a year ago.
[https://nypost.com/2021/03/15/researchers-identify-50-additional-genes-for-eye-color/](https://nypost.com/2021/03/15/researchers-identify-50-additional-genes-for-eye-color/)
From the article 52% of eye color genes are thought to be identified.
Guesswork based on that – over 100 genes, if those were just on/off that means there’s around 6 billion possible combinations, which is near the number of people in the world. genes aren’t necessarily just on/off they may be different so the number would be exponentially higher.
Which means there’s no way to tell the actual chances without knowing all the genes involved in both parents, and accounting for mutations not occurring in either. Those probabilities given are basically pseudo-science.
For my case, my daughter has blue eyes, my son brown, while I’ve got olive green and my wife’s are ‘hazel’ which is a grab bag of colors, in her case brown center, yellow middle, and blue-grey edge.
TD;DR too many possibilities we don’t know, probabilities given anywhere are garbage.
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