Thursday, January 31, 2008

It's Science: Blue-Eyed People Are The Result Of Incest

Hmm.

According to Professor Hans Eiberg of the University of Copenhagen, all blue-eyed people can be traced back to a common ancestor in the Black Sea region about 10,000 years ago. Apparently, blue eye colour is the result of a genetic mutation and the mutation is identical in 99.5% of known cases making us all distantly related.

Brown is the "default" colour for human eyes which results from a build-up of the dark skin pigment, melanin.
However, in northern Europe a mutation arose in a gene known as OCA2 that disrupted melanin production in the iris and caused the eye colour to become blue.


Well, the more you know. Knowledge is power and all that.


Genetic mutation or not, us blue-eyed folk seem to do alright for ourselves.





I love science.

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