Question: this is a question about eye colour. so, my mum has brown eyes and my dad has kind of blue, yet i have a mix, and my siblings have different colours as well. my grandparents all either have blue or brown eyes, and my grate grandparents had brown. why is that?

Remsha Afzal answered on 11 Nov 2018:

Hi there, that is a very good question!
So scientists used to think that eye color was controlled by ONE gene and followed a simple pattern of genetic inheritance where brown eye color was dominant to blue eye color. Meaning it was believed that parents who had blue eyes will only have blue-eyed children and couldn’t have children with brown eyes, and parents where one had brown eyes and the other blue eyes will have mostly brown eyed children. However, this model was considered too simplistic. The inheritance of eye color is more complicated than was thought before because more than one gene is involved (There are up to 10 genes reported to control eye color). While a child’s eye color can often be predicted by the eye colors of their parents and grandparents, variation in those genes can sometimes produce unexpected results. Hope that helped 🙂