The mother has brown eyes, the father as well: who is really clear what color eyes the baby. Or is it? Well, if it were that simple. In fact, however, are the inheritance of eye color and have involved at least three disparate genes, whose exact duties that science has still not completely figured out. Really surprising, because in 1907 she published the Brothers Davenport 1-gene model that was initially described apparently quite accurate, resulting in blue, green and brown eyes, your model assumes that there is a single gene that determines our eye color .

This gene is located in two identical “copies” before the gene structure of father and mother. The presumption of Davenport: There is in each of the two gene copies of either an expression (allele) for brown eyes and an expression for light blue eyes. The mother of an allele for brown and the father has an allele for blue, the child inherits one blue and one brown allele.

Sounds once funny: Does this mean that the junior one blue and one brown eye have? No, that is, fortunately not. For allele which is active, depends on what the dominant characteristic. Law to Davenport: brown eyes are dominant, while blue eyes are recessive. A child with brown-eyed, blue-eyed mother and father and therefore has brown eyes. Later, the blues but can certainly lose their dominance. Only thus could explain the two scientists that are not always black and blue is just brown.

But how is it with people who are green or gray eyes? Exactly here is the Davenport model come into a tailspin. In reality, the inheritance of eye color is brown / green / blue that is determined by much more than just one gene with two forms. Rather, there are characteristics of brown, blue and green eyes, with the dominance of the genes from brown to green to blue decreases.

Moreover, science assumes that there are other genes that influence the various shades of colors. In addition, the editorial staff to produce the chemical melanin pigment is highly complex. Follow the production of the dye must therefore not always the known rules of genetics – and the children therefore do not always have to inherit eye color from their parents or grandparents.