"Don't it make my brown eyes blue"

Ah, the mysteries of genetics. Have you ever wondered how a man and a woman, with brown and hazel eyes respectively, can spawn children with blue eyes? Well, Richard and I have wondered the very same thing. Barring any questions of paternity of which, in this case, there are none as I'd be the first to boast had I a lover of blue eyes and fertile loins tucked away in some private love nest, we must then work with the available data of a brown-eyed father.

In my quest to solve the mystery behind heredity and eye colour, I discovered a very interesting web site called, appropriately enough, What Color Eyes Would Your Children Have? This site boasts an "eye colo[u]r calculator" into which you can enter your information and generate the different probabilities for eye colours amongst your hypothetical children. You are instructed to select the eye colour closest to your own. I chose green. Little did I realize that hazel eyes, which I possess (see photo at the beginning of this post for proof), are the wild card of the world of eye-colour probability. Unlike the phenotypes of green, blue and brown eyes, which are composed of a solid colour, hazel eyes are a combination of different colours. Mine, for instance, are a greenish-gold with a small ring of brown around the pupil of the eye. Incidentally, my mother's eyes are also hazel, whereas my father had brown eyes.

According to the calculator, the probability that Richard and I would produce a child with blue eyes is approximately 16.5%. Ridley is approaching his third birthday and his eyes are an indisputable blue-grey colour. Nigel's eyes are also a similar blue-grey colour, though he is only 5-months of age and eye colour can spontaneously change upwards of two-years of age.

Interesting stuff, huh? Now I only wonder whether anyone will inherit my curly hair...?

*Many profuse apologies, but I couldn't resist quoting from the sappy Crystal Gayle song for the title of this post."Don't it make my brown eyes blue" played on the radio ad nauseam when I was a kid in the late seventies and it is only today, several years later, that I've picked up on the double-meaning with the word "blue". Duh.