When a light skinned person and a dark skinned person have a child, that child is likely to have a mix of those skin tones, resulting in a caramel hue. However, when someone with blond hair and someone with black hair have a child, the child would either have blond or black hair rather than a mix of the two producing brown.
And where do eye colour genes fall in here?
In: Biology
Complex traits and phenotypes are usually poly- or at least oligogenic. This means the result is governed by more than one gene. Besides that, depending on the nature of the gene products, some alleles have products that interact differently. We all know the recessive and dominant genes, but it’s more than that. The dominant we learn about in school is the complete dominant. There are also incomplete dominant and codominant genes. The former is when the two alleles mix together to produce a phenotype, like red and white mixing to produce pink flowers. The latter is when both alleles are expressed together, so red and white would produce striped petals with alternating red and white.
As I mentioned above, it depends on the nature of the product. For example, if each gene produces a different pigment but all over the petals, then when they’re different, you get a color that is a mix of the two. When each allele gets expressed in different petals or different regions of petals (due to whatever reason, too complex for this), you get stripes or some other pattern. This is extremely oversimplified, but I just wanted to give you an idea about how it can work.
Edit: English
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