Help me out, my eyes are green, my ex husband's are blue and my daughter's are brown (I PROMISE you he's her father). She's taking a genetics class in college and jokingly asked if she was adopted because that is supposed to be impossible. Any explanations?
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blue eyes + green eyes = genetic eyes
Derrick
The actual genetics of the inheritance of eye colour is a lot more complicated than the Mendelian model that is taught in less advanced courses.
There are multiple genes that play a role in eye colour, as evidenced by the fact that blue, green, and brown all exist so it couldn't be as simple as dominant B and recessive b.
It isn't all that common, but there are explanations as to why one may have distinct pigmentation that seems at odds with their parentage.
Elaine M
There are eye color genetic charts online.
Gray Bold
It runs in the family. The genetics and inheritance of eye color in humans is complicated. So far, as many as 15 genes have been associated with eye color inheritance. The earlier belief that blue eye and green eye color is a simple recessive trait has been shown to be incorrect. The genetics of eye color are so complex that almost any parent-child combination of eye colors can occur. In biology, an atavism is a modification of a biological structure whereby an ancestral genetic trait reappears after having been lost through evolutionary change in previous generations. Atavisms can occur in several ways; one of which is when genes for previously existing phenotypic features are preserved in DNA, and these become expressed through a mutation that either knocks out the overriding genes for the new traits or makes the old traits override the new one.
JazSinc
There's more than one or two gene loci which help determine eye color in humans. It's not a simple Mendelian situation. Teachers and textbooks should stop using human eye color for sample problems because they don't fit the real world.
Next thing you know, your daughter is going to be asking you if you can roll your tongue. That's in textbooks but not a real world situation either. Tongue-rolling is a learned behavior; it's not genetic at all.
Anyway, if you have somewhere between $300 and $600 lying around, you can get DNA tests for you, your husband, and your daughter. Google for
DNA testing