Blue Eyes Not Endemic & Predictive of Male Mate Selection

[RPizzle]

This material is somewhat old, but I remember reading about it, and I always found it interesting. I have blue eyes by the way.

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/003842.html

Men Subconsciously Prefer Blue Eyed Women As Paternity Test
Natural selection gave blue eyed men a preference for blue eyed women. Natural selection for women whose babies will be more obviously testable for paternity gave many men a preference for blue-eyed women.

Before you request a paternity test, spend a few minutes looking at your child’s eye color. It may just give you the answer you’re looking for. According to Bruno Laeng and colleagues, from the University of Tromso, Norway, the human eye color reflects a simple, predictable and reliable genetic pattern of inheritance. Their studies1, published in the Springer journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, show that blue-eyed men find blue-eyed women more attractive than brown-eyed women. According to the researchers, it is because there could be an unconscious male adaptation for the detection of paternity, based on eye color.

Since blue eyes are a recessive trait the reason for the preference for blue eyes by men is explainable with classical Mendelian genetics:

The laws of genetics state that eye color is inherited as follows:
1. If both parents have blue eyes, the children will have blue eyes.
2. If both parents have brown eyes, a quarter of the children will have blue eyes, and three quarters will have brown eyes.
3. The brown eye form of the eye color gene (or allele) is dominant, whereas the blue eye allele is recessive.
It then follows that if a child born to two blue-eyed parents does not have blue eyes, then the blue-eyed father is not the biological father. It is therefore reasonable to expect that a man would be more attracted towards a woman displaying a trait that increases his paternal confidence, and the likelihood that he could uncover his partner’s sexual infidelity.

Eighty-eight male and female students were asked to rate facial attractiveness of models on a computer. The pictures were close-ups of young adult faces, unfamiliar to the participants. The eye color of each model was manipulated, so that for each model’s face two versions were shown, one with the natural eye color (blue/brown) and another with the other color (brown/blue). The participants’ own eye color was noted.

Both blue-eyed and brown-eyed women showed no difference in their preferences for male models of either eye color. Similarly, brown-eyed men showed no preference for either blue-eyed or brown-eyed female models. However, blue-eyed men rated blue-eyed female models as more attractive than brown-eyed models.

That means there is a place or set of places in the genome where genetic variations give some of us our pronounced preference for blue eyes. I also prefer green eyes. Does the same set of genetic variations cause both preferences?

There's a lesson here for for future parents who will be able to use genetic engineering techniques to choose eye color for their daughters: Choose blue to maximize the appeal of their daughters. The blue color won't cost them any with the brown eyed guys but will boost their appeal to blue eyed guys.

However the very trait that increases attractiveness of women has a different effect in men: It decreases the range of women who they find attractive. If you want your son to find a larger range of women attractive then it actually makes sense to give him brown eyes.

Blue eyed men tend to have blue eyed romantic partners.

In a second study, a group of 443 young adults of both sexes and different eye colors were asked to report the eye color of their romantic partners. Blue-eyed men were the group with the largest proportion of partners of the same eye color.

According to Bruno Laeng and colleagues, “It is remarkable that blue-eyed men showed such a clear preference for women with the same eye color, given that the present experiment did not request participants to choose prospective sexual mates, but only to provide their aesthetic or attractiveness responses…based on face close-up photographs.” Blue-eyed men may have unconsciously learned to value a physical trait that can facilitate recognition of own kin.

Once offspring genetic engineering becomes possible I am expecting we will see a huge surge in births of blue eyed and blond hair daughters. They'll also have larger lips, more bottle-shaped bodies, greater symmetry, higher cheekbones, and every other feature that is considered sexy and beautiful. People will make their sons more physically attractive as well. The future will be beautiful.

[RPizzle]

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/042

Blue eyes have their hue because of a single genetic mutation that occurred fewer than 10,000 years ago in one individual and swept rapidly through the European population, according to a study published in the journal Human Genetics in January.
After studying some 800 individuals from Denmark, Turkey, and Jordan, the researchers pinpointed a single base-pair change in the human genome that showed up in all the blue-eyed people and none of the brown-eyed people. “There was one founder mutation that gave rise to all the people in Europe who have blue eyes,” says report coauthor Jesper Troelsen, a University of Copenhagen molecular biologist. “It was quite surprising.”

Those with blue eyes also shared a number of other genetic markers in the same region—a stretch of DNA that regulates production of the pigment melanin. The tweak causes the iris to manufacture less melanin, lending the eyes their lighter shade.
As DNA passes down through generations, it gets shuffled and reshuffled. Because this particular stretch of DNA was so similar—barely shuffled—among all the blue-eyed people studied, the researchers inferred that the blue-eyes mutation is fairly young. Its apparently rapid spread through the population also suggests that, evolutionarily speaking, the mutation had something to offer. “It’s difficult to know what happened 10,000 years ago,” Troelsen says, but blue eyes may be linked with other traits—such as light skin color—that came in handy for early northern Europeans.

[RPizzle]

I have yet to study this with the rigor necessary to make conclusions about the articles. Just FYI.