05 Feb 2008

Blue-eyed humans come from a single, common mutant

Pretty much.

New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today…

This part makes me happy to be a unique creature of this earth:

…The mutation of brown eyes to blue represents neither a positive nor a negative mutation. It is one of several mutations such as hair colour, baldness, freckles and beauty spots, which neither increases nor reduces a human’s chance of survival. As Professor Eiberg says, “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.”

via The Existence

Comments

  • nathan
    February 7, 2008 Reply

    I was reading up on eye colors the other day for whatever reason, random Wikipidi’ing I guess…

    I found it interesting that primarily it’s only Indian- and European-descendants who have eyes that aren’t brown or hazel. And apparently purple eyes are a reality, being most likely in the Indian people, again.

    Indian as in from India, not from Indiana or teepees.

    Just interesting in the way that I wonder why these types of people picked up varied eye colors and others didn’t…and being so geographically different.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.