Are all blue eyed people related?

blue eyes descend from a single genetic mutation means that every single person on the planet with blue eyes descended from one common ancestor. In fact, a team of geneticists at the University of Copenhagen actually traced that mutation all the way back to a single Danish family.

rd.com - If You Have Blue Eyes, You're Related to More People Than You Thought

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Whether you're a brown-eyed girl or five-foot-two, eyes of blue, it's what's inside that counts. Seriously, we mean that. Your eye color has everything to do with your genetics, and if you're blue eyed, you can probably figure out who's a distant relative just by looking at them. It could be said that all eyes are the same color. That’s because the pigment that gives our eyes color, melanin, is naturally brown. In fact, originally, “we all had brown eyes,” a professor from the University of Copenhagen, Hans Rudolf Litchoff Eiberg, PhD, told Science Daily. Somewhere along the way, however, someone was born with a genetic mutation, Dr. Eiberg explains. That genetic mutation limited the amount of melanin the person’s eyes could produce, with the visual effect being that the eyes appeared blue, rather than brown. Interesting, you might be thinking, but what do blue eyes genetics have to do with me? Well, the fact that all (so-called!) blue eyes descend from a single genetic mutation means that every single person on the planet with blue eyes descended from one common ancestor. In fact, a team of geneticists at the University of Copenhagen actually traced that mutation all the way back to a single Danish family. “By linkage analysis…we fine-mapped the blue-eye color,” Dr. Eiberg’s team reported in the journal, Human Genetics. Through that analysis, it was discovered that an identifiable group of genes had been inherited together from one single parent—the scientific word for a group of genes inherited together from a single parent is “haplotype.” The identified haplotype was common not just among 155 blue-eyed individuals from Denmark, but also five blue-eyed individuals from Turkey, and two blue-eyed individuals from Jordan. In addition to haplotype mapping, Dr. Eiberg’s team conducted mitochondrial DNA analysis, which looks at patterns of genetic mutation to trace maternal ancestry back hundreds of thousands of years. “Variation in the color of the eyes from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes,” Dr. Eiberg notes. “From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor…They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.” Brown-eyed individuals, by contrast, have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production.

So, are blue eyes a mutation? Yes. But is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Neither, according to Dr. Eiberg. “It simply shows that nature is constantly shuffling the human genome, creating a genetic cocktail of human chromosomes and trying out different changes as it does so.” What we can presume, however, is that the color of our eyes is not the only thing trait that went along with the mutation that led to that color. For example, if you have blue eyes, you are far more likely to also have the following traits:

higher melanoma risk

more likely to be competitive

lower vitiligo risk

To find out more about your own ancestry, you can try genetic testing. But be aware that you may not always be prepared for what you find out.

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Why do firstborns look like their dads?

There's an old theory that says first-born babies were genetically predispositioned to look more like their father. It was believed this was so the father accepted the child was his and would provide and care for them. There's also another theory that says it was so he didn't eat the baby…

kiindred.co - Do first-born babies actually look more like their fathers? - Kiindred

There’s an old theory that says first-born babies were genetically predispositioned to look more like their father. It was believed this was so the father accepted the child was his and would provide and care for them. There’s also another theory that says it was so he didn’t eat the baby… These theories obviously date way, way back, long before paternity tests existed (or cannibalism was frowned upon). But even today, all new parents can’t help but look at their baby and wonder, who does it look like? It’s often one of the first things people will comment on when they meet a little one for the first time.

But is there actually any truth to the theory at all?

A 1995 study from the University of California sought to prove the theory by matching photos of 1-year-old children with pictures of their father. The study asked 122 participants to match photos of children at 1-year, 10-years and 20-years with photos of both their mothers and fathers. In infants, just under 50% guessed correctly for the fathers, as opposed to around 37% for the mothers. The success rates decreased significantly in 10-year-olds and rose slightly again in 20-year-olds. A similar study in 2004 with a much larger sample size found that, in fact, most infants resemble both parents equally. In concluding the study, co-author and psychologist at the University of Padova in Italy Paola Bressan noted that to the best of her knowledge, “no study has either replicated or supported” the findings from the 1995 study that stated babies resemble their fathers.

But even though the science isn’t there to back up the theory, why do so many of us say it rings true, that firstborns do tend to look more like their father?

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