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Current Talk '07 I / Re: Jenny
« on: February 15, 2007, 03:22:56 AM »No. Blue-eyed Quentin and blue-eyed Angelique could not have produced brown-eyed Daniel because the gene for blue eyes is recessive.
It's much much more common to see the reverse, but yes, it is possible. You have to forget what you were taught in high school-- that brown eyes are dominant over blue eyes-- because in fact eye color is influenced by more than just one gene. Through recombination and inheritance from both parents, the dominant phenotype (i.e. brown eyes) can emerge from parents with a largely recessive phenotype (blue eyes). (Getting back to DS, PT Quentin's and Angelique's ancestry is not completely clear.) My information comes from my Masters studies in Developmental Biology, but if you'd prefer to hear it from a geneticist, that's cool with me:
http://www.thetech.org/genetics/ask.php?id=29