I am doing some science work at present, specifically inheritance and variation. I keep finding references to eye colour. Blue is recessive and brown is dominant but I can't seem to find out whether green is recessive or dominant, or some kind of variation on this. Can anyone help?

Baloo55th

The problem here is that you're not dealing with simple dominance. Simple dominance is where you have two states - say tall and short with tall dominant. TT and Tt will give tall, tt will give short. Easy stuff. Unfortunately, not all things are governed by simple dominance. There is also incomplete dominance, where an intermediate can result from a mixed inheritance. Eye colour would seem to be a case of incomplete dominance. Apart from which, quite a few things are comtrolled by more than one gene, so you can have mixed/mixed inheritance, or pure/mixed and so on. There is such a wide variation in eye colour that there are probably multiple genes at work there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_dominance Jan 18 07, 7:25 AM

satguru

I'll add that eye colours are really based on two families, the brown family and the blue family. Whichever gene is brown also includes hazel and green, all dominant, blue includes grey which is recessive. As the grains of colour are scattered it all depends on the amount and concentration as to which colour the eyes end up appearing, despite having the same gene type. Jan 18 07, 9:35 AM