How does heterochromia affect offspring eye color?

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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

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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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