All people having blue eyes have common ancestor

 

Nevertheless, I do not really buy the story. It might be that the study was genuine, but the news-bringer messed it up both by trying to be comprihensible to laymen and have an attractive headline. Most science is messed up by oversimplification and popularisation before it reaches the general public.

 

Originally posted by SearchAndDestroy Pretty obviously blue eyes are a genetic mutation from brown, but there's no reason - scientific reason anyway - to assume the mutation only took place once. They just matched everyone with Blue eyes to the related a related gene that is known to effect the eyes. Following the mtDNA that everyone matches with and finding that they had a common ancestor too.

One of the things that worried me in the article was that it said

This genetic material comes from females, so it can trace maternal lineages.

that seems to show a fundamental misunderstanding about chromosomes. For one thing, if the chromosome involved is not one of the X/Y pair, it could have come from either the father or the mother, so it could belong to either the paternal or maternal lineages whatever the sex of the subject. If it was a 'Y' chromosome (the subject was male) then it would have to come from the paternal lineage, but if it was an 'X' chromosome it could have come from either the mother or the father: hence if it's from a female you don't know which lineage it represents.

They also said that one person did not match up with everyone else out of the group which means there was another mutation in a seperate lineage.

A different mutation would be from a separate lineage. However, the same mutation could occur in a different lineage. At best it's a matter of probability, and the odds really can't be objectively calculated.

But if mutations aren't scarce like this, then why hasn't other groups of people had similar gene changes? We see a wide veriety of peoples with the eye colors, but they have been linked for centuries too.   Gcle, I know you are far more knowledagable on this subject, but these are questions I've thought about and these just seem to fit in with what this article is about. They are discussing people from Europe to the Middle East, and these people have had close links with each other throughout history. But we don't see these mutations in sub-sahara Africa, or the far east. But in the United States, I have seen African Americans with eyes that are on the more greener side, and to me that points to a mix in their background.

Mutations changing eye colour may well be rarer than the example I gave of haemophilia. And as Temujin pointed out, there are different 'blues' involved, so it isn't a question of all these people having identical part-genotypes. The important thing however is that all hese calculations are probabilistic, not definitive.

 

<<Blue eye colour most likely originated from the near east area or northwest part of the Black Sea region, where the great agriculture migration to the northern part of Europe took place in the Neolithic periods about six�10,000 years ago.

�That is my best guess,� he said. �It could be the northern part of Afghanistan.� >>

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml;jsessionid=APJEN0U2XRMFFQFIQMGCFFWAVCBQUIV0?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/01/30/scieyes130.xml

That a specific single female or X Chromosome thing though is throwing me off, but it supposed to have come from the Neolithic, from the Agriculturists.

My guess is it came with Y-Chromosomes I & J though.
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2005/12/s22-shared-by-y-haplogroups-i-and-j.html

But mtDNA like J or H can also be likely as well.

An interesting theory, being the neophyte that I am when it comes to this branch of study I'm not sure what to make of it at this time.

 

Originally posted by bilal_ali_2000        And about  blue eyes. Blue eyes are very sensitive to sun light. I had an albino friend Ammad. And his eyes were almost completely shut because he was extremely sensitive to the abudant sunlight of Pakistan and could not open them at all. Same is the case with almost all the other albinos which i see occasionally, their eyes are almost completely shut because they are very sensitive to sunlight. The picture that i have posted of  an albino African has lost his eye sight completely because of this and the website is asking for funds so that they can supply the albinos of Tanzania with sunglasses to pretect them from the sun.     And whenever there is not too much sunlight there will be no reason for melanin in their eyes and they will tend to have blue eyes like many people in the cold climates of the Himalayas, Turkey and North Africa have.

I'm a rather...whats the word...oblivious sort of individual.  If bilal hadn't mentioned that I'd probably have grown old and died still having no idea.  (there's a great saying; out of mind out of something, of course I can't remember it, sums me up quite well though) It very well could be common knowledge here and I'm simply the only one unawares.  Hmm, I don't wear contacts but that makes sense they would increase sensitivity. 

 

Originally posted by bilal_ali_2000 This is an albnio from far east asia (indonesian) http://www.pahof.de/mediac/400_0/media/DIR_36280/albino~2.jpg   This is an albnio from Tanzania(Africa) http://www.visionsupport.org/pics/albino.jpg This is an albino from Japan (Far east) http://eschaton.tv/events/Momus%20in%20Paris/Freaky%20Japanese%20Albino.jpg   AS you can see blonde hair and blue eyes exist among all populations. And seeing the condition of skin of these people you can understand that why blonde hair and blue eyes is not the normal course of things in those environments.

 

Yeesh, I've seen a few albinos in my life, Europeans and Asians, but none of them were particularly ugly beyond being far too pale.

 

I have blue eyes, but I tan just fine and I've never experienced the symptoms Justinian mentioned, I'm guessing those could have many other causes. Personally I developed blue eyes with the specific purpose of attracting mates, but it hasn't been working lately so I'm thinking of switching to green.

 

          The pictures of Albinos that which i had posted weren't clear about their eye color. These would fare better

 

 

 

       As you can see that all of them have blue eyes while at the same time they are all Africans as you canjudge by their features.

 

 

 

     Bro how can this be racist. In these type of topics, as in the case of most scholistic studies, where there are many new angles pondered you should not be so touchy. Europeans are not Albinos, they can tan just fine because unlike albinos they can produce mealnin.

 

         However the abnormality of Albinoism allows us to see the extremities of a situation. The abnormality of Osteoperosis allows us to see that what happens when we have calcium defeciency and how crucial is calcium to our bones. Similarly the abnormality of Albinoism allows us to see that what happens whne we dpon't have any melanin in our eyes, hair and skin which is that our skin turns white, our hair turns blonde and our eyes turn blue. 

 

       Do you consider researchers who say that East Asians are lactose intolerant racist for saying something that the East Asians lack because of their unique circumstances just like European are said to lack melanin because of theirown unique circumstances. 

 

     So the moral of the story is that our eyes are brown because of melanin otherwise they would be blue.

 

         And just like mealnin in the skin is dependent on the climate i.e lack of sunlight, similarly melanin in the eyes is also dependent on climate i.e lack of sunlight and therefore people in sunlight starved climates have blue eyes just as they have fairer skin and light hair because of the absence of melanin.

 

         The number of blue eyes in a population is directly propotional to the lack of  sunlight in their region, simple as that. It exist in perfect propotion all over the world. Africans almost never have blue eyes yet as they go up to north africa people very rarely can have blue eyes and in the extreme north of Africa blue eys are very common. Then in  medeteranian Europe people are predominantly brown eyes yet blue eyes do regularly occur among them. In central Europe people have a much larger incidence of blue eyes and people in the extreme north of Europe have the largest number of blue eyes people in the world. You can observe the same phenomena in west asia and in the subcontinent. There almost does not occur a single region in the world  where this relationship is violoated. 

 

          You certainly don't need any contrived theories explaining that how all blue eyed people are descendent of a single person.

 

            And if push comes to shove this idea has to be said is very very racist. A blue eyed person in Pakistan by this idea has more to do with a blue eys guy in Scandanvia than he has with his fellow brown eyed Pakistanis including persons in his own family. Sparten's blue eyed sister has more relevance to a blue eyed German than she has to his brown eyed brother. Blue eyes in predominantly brown eyed populations exists as natural variation, simple. Classifying people purely on appearance is primarily a European and more specifically Germanic hang up. In my study of history i  have never seen people place so much impotance in appearance as European when they had their day in the sun have. Herodotus in his work "Account of Egypt" while discussing that whether Egyptians have any relation to a particular group says that both of them have dark skin and curly hair but then goes on to say that that does not mean anything as other people other than Egyptians and that group also have those charactertisitcs and you cannot decide anything based just on appearance.              

       

     I also occasionaly run acrosswhite nationalists on the internet who have compiled up a list of people all over the world who have blue eyes and fair skin as well as brown hair such as in western Iran, in northern subcontinent and the like and they have some type of delusions of reuniting these people from all over the world under the ideal of "white bortherhood". 

 

  Well to most of the world these ideas are stupid, and Eurpeans should not impose these type of ideas like this "theory" on us. Blue eyes, white skin and blonde hair occur because of a sun deprived climate the more sun deprived the climate the lighter and more common these features will be, simple nothinhhg more nothing less.