What are the odds?

I couldn't help noticing that the majority of the children I photographed during my trip to Texas have blue eyes. Maybe I noticed this because I'm a genetisist or maybe it's due to how much time I spend looking at eyes while editing pictures.

I'm sure one of my fellow nerds will calculate it for me, but what are the odds of 75% of these children having blue eyes, when brown is dominant?



Fig 1. Lower right-hand corner, the 25% with brown eyes

In college, a party trick of mine was to calculate a couple's chance of having a child with blue eyes if they had offspring with their current partner. Yep, I'd draw out punnett squares at parties on napkins. Recently, I learned that everything I thought I knew about eye color genetics was really oversimplified, so I don't know if the odds I calculated are close to the true odds. If they are, I have a 1/6th chance of not "contaminating my husband's gene pool with my brown eyes." Those are his words. He comes from a blue-eyed family. I like to remind him that my eye color will dominate over his. Yeah, that's what two married scientists joke about.


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