How Rare Are Red Hair Blue Eyes?

How Rare Are Red Hair Blue Eyes
Are redheads with blue eyes really going extinct? For every 100 people in the world, only one or two will have red hair. And when you meet a red head with blue eyes, you are looking at the rarest colour combination of all for human beings. The odds of having both red hair and blue eyes sits at around 0.17 per cent. Picture: Shutterstock Around 17 per cent of people have blue eyes, and when combined with, the odds of having both traits are around 0.17 per cent. That’s, out of the 7.6 billion on Earth.

So with numbers this low, could redheads with blue eyes actually go extinct?
The reason these looks are so unusual is because they are the result of two different sets of DNA instructions, or mutations, happening in the same person, explains Professor Mark Elgar, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Melbourne.
“The mutations occurred tens of thousands of years ago, and have now become established as different versions or variants of the genes that help determine our skin and eye colour.

“Red hair and blue eyes are both recessive traits which means a person needs to inherit both of the genes for red hair and blue eyes, from both parents. In contrast, brown hair and brown eyes are dominant traits, which is why they are much more prevalent.” In some regions of the world, red heads are more common, making up 10-30 per cent of the population in for example.

Blue-eyed people are also more common in the Baltic regions of Northern Europe.
There are a number of ways rare traits can be lost from a population,” says Professor Elgar.
A common misconception is that when a trait is rare, it could be lost through a dilution effect – the few individuals that carry the gene don’t reproduce, and so it is lost to future generations.

“But although it is recessive, red hair is unlikely to suffer from this effect. Even when we can’t always see red hair, many people still carry the genes. Red hair can range from strawberry blonde to the deepest auburn. Picture: Shutterstock “Another case is where a gene reduces an individual’s chance of reproducing, perhaps by increasing the risk of early mortality, and again, these genes would become rarer over successive generations,” he explains.

What is the rarest eye color for redheads?

– The hair, skin, and eye colors you’re born with are all controlled by your genes. Your parents passed these genes down to you, just as their parents passed down their genetic makeup to them. When it comes to hair and eye color, some genes are more dominant than others.

Yet dominant doesn’t necessarily mean more common. What determines your hair, eye, and skin color is a pigment called melanin. Genes provide the instructions for producing melanin. Your genes determine how much of this pigment you have, and therefore, what color hair and eyes you have. The MCR1 gene dictates whether you have red hair, and it’s recessive.

That means you’d need to inherit copies from both parents to have this color combination. Genes also have variants, known as alleles. At least three different genes control eye color, and there can be more than two alleles for each gene. For example, the MCR1 gene comes in two variants: non-red and red.

The non-red version is dominant.
Gey, which is one of the genes that determines eye color, comes in two forms: Green and blue.
Blue is the dominant allele.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
Also critical to how common a color combination is within a given population is which alleles are circulating.

For example, alleles of the gene OCA2 determine whether someone has brown or not-brown eyes. In populations where more people have the not-brown OCA2 allele — like in Scandinavia — the allele for light eyes is more common, even though it’s recessive. Light-eyed people pass their genes to their children, who pass them to their children, and that eye color perpetuates.

Is red hair and blue eyes special?

Are redheads with blue eyes really going extinct? For every 100 people in the world, only one or two will have red hair. And when you meet a red head with blue eyes, you are looking at the rarest colour combination of all for human beings. The odds of having both red hair and blue eyes sits at around 0.17 per cent. Picture: Shutterstock Around 17 per cent of people have blue eyes, and when combined with, the odds of having both traits are around 0.17 per cent. That’s, out of the 7.6 billion on Earth.

So with numbers this low, could redheads with blue eyes actually go extinct?
The reason these looks are so unusual is because they are the result of two different sets of DNA instructions, or mutations, happening in the same person, explains Professor Mark Elgar, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Melbourne.
“The mutations occurred tens of thousands of years ago, and have now become established as different versions or variants of the genes that help determine our skin and eye colour.

Blue-eyed people are also more common in the Baltic regions of Northern Europe. “There are a number of ways rare traits can be lost from a population,” says Professor Elgar. “A common misconception is that when a trait is rare, it could be lost through a dilution effect – the few individuals that carry the gene don’t reproduce, and so it is lost to future generations.

Does red hair skip a generation?

How can red hair skip a generation and reappear in a family? Traits like red hair or blue eyes that skip generations can be frustrating (especially if your mailman has red hair and/or blue eyes!). But it is perfectly natural. And explainable by genetics.

Many of our traits come from our genes.
There are genes that determine eye shape, hair texture, hair, eye, and skin color, etc.
The traits that are most likely to skip generations are the ones caused by recessive gene versions.
To understand what this means, we need to remember two things about our genes.

First, we have two copies of most of our genes – one from mom and one from dad. And second, our genes can come in different versions called alleles. These different versions can lead to different traits. Traits like red hair can skip many generations. (Image: ) For example, there are versions of the MC1R gene that lead to red hair.

And versions that don’t lead to red hair.
What this all means is that people can have three possible combinations of the MC1R gene.
They can have two non-red versions, two red versions, or one of each.
It is pretty obvious that having two non-red versions means you won’t have red hair.
And that having two red versions means you will have red hair.

But what if you have one version of each? This is where recessive comes in. Not all versions of genes are created equal – some versions are “weaker” than other ones. In genetics speak, we’d say that some alleles are recessive and some are dominant. The red hair versions of the MC1R gene are recessive to the other MC1R versions.

So if you have a red and a non-red version of the MC1R gene, then you won’t have red hair. But you carry the recessive red hair version that you can pass down to your kids. Another way to say this is that you are a carrier for red hair. Carriers are the reason why traits can skip generations. I am going to use your story as a way of explaining why this is.

Writing and saying non-red version of MC1R or red version of MC1R gets a bit tiring after a while. So I will do what geneticists do. I will call the non-red version of the MC1R gene R and the red version r, I also used that naming system in this figure: Imagine that your grandfather was a redhead and that your grandmother wasn’t a carrier.

This would make grandpa rr and grandma RR, None of their kids would have red hair but they would all be carriers because grandpa would pass on his red hair gene. All the kids have a non-red copy of the MC1R gene ( R ) from grandma and a red copy ( r ) from grandpa – they would all be Rr, Let’s say one of these kids is your mother and that your father wasn’t a carrier.

In other words, your mom is Rr and your dad is RR, Your mother has an equal chance of passing either the red ( r ) or the non-red ( R ) version to her kids. Let’s say she passed the red hair version to you. Since your dad wasn’t a carrier, this means he passed only a non-red version ( R ) to you.

So you are a carrier for red hair ( Rr ).
So now we have gone two generations without a redhead.
Imagine that something similar happened on your husband’s side of the family.
Now here you are, both carriers for red hair ( Rr ).
As I said before, a carrier has an equal chance of passing either copy of a gene to his or her child.

So each of your children has a 1 in 2 chance of getting a red hair version ( r ) from you and the same chance of getting a red hair version ( r ) from your husband. To figure out the chances that you both will pass an r down to your kids, you multiply the chances together.

This means that each child has a 1 in 4 chance of getting two r versions and having red hair. The chances for this happening with both your kids are 1 in 16 (again just multiplying the chances together). To give you some idea about how likely this is, it is about the same chance as flipping a coin four times and getting four heads in a row.

Or the same as a family having four boys in a row. Not the most common outcome but we’ve all seen families with kids of all one sex or the other. So there you have it. Recessive traits like red hair can skip generations because they can hide out in a carrier behind a dominant trait.

Do gingers like full sun?

Do ginger plants need full sun? – No. Ginger plants grow best in a partial shade location, where they will get 4-5 hours of indirect sunlight. Too much direct sun will burn their leaves.

Do gingers look younger?

The MC1R gene might actually make redheads look young – According to research published in Current Biology, people with the MC1R gene, aka the gene that produces red hair and fair skin, tend to look several years younger than their non-ginger counterparts.