Why do you have blue eyes?

Gene Expression
By Razib Khan
Sep 23, 2007 1:30 AMNov 5, 2019 9:25 AM

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Well, you may not have blue eyes, but many people do. The post below suggests that there is still a lot of confusion on how eye color is inherited, but now in 2007 we are coming close to clearing up many issues. A paper which came out early this year, A Three-Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism Haplotype in Intron 1 of OCA2 Explains Most Human Eye-Color Variation (Open Access), suggests that about

3/4 of the eye color variation in Europeans (from pale blue to dark brown) can be explained by polymorphism around the OCA2 gene

. In other words, eye color comes close to being a monogenic Mendelian trait when it comes to inheritance, but not quite.

The diagram below is probably close to what you learned in high school:

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