LBY3
The continuing adventures of Beau Yarbrough

Blue eyed girls and blue eyed boys

Friday, June 15, 2007, 10:19
Section: Miscellany

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts this week, can you tell? This was from Sanda Tsing Loh’s science podcast:

The genetics are simple: Blue-eyed parents make ONLY blue-eyed children. A brown eyed girl would be, well, the milkman’s.

Whereas brown-eyed parents–and a blue and a brown–can legitimately have babies with either eye color.

Does this effect how we hook up?

Bruno Laeng of the University of Troms� in Norway says yes.

He recruited forty-four men and women with blue and brown eyes and had them rate photos of the opposite sex for attractiveness. Another forty-four rated photos of the same folks whose eye color had been digitally swapped–from blue to brown and vice versa.

Women and brown-eyed guys had no preference for blues or browns. But blue-eyed MEN found blue-eyed ladies MUCH more attractive. Subconsciously, Laeng says, they’re drawn to the surefire future indicator, via those blue-eyed babies, that they have not been cheated on.

This explains a lot.

(I first became a fan of Sandra’s through her KPCC audio column, but the new science thing is pretty good, too. And it’s daily.)


3 Comments »

  1. well, i like the research, but I think the conclusions might be a bit off. that last sentence needs ‘unless it was with another blue-eyed guy’ added 😉

    Comment by Tony — June 18, 2007 @ 1:46

  2. I actually wasted my time looking up the eye colors of Anna Nicole Smith, Howard K. Stern, and Larry Birkhead. :p

    Comment by Jenn — June 19, 2007 @ 7:35

  3. Something about this got me a bit interested in reading around it…turns out that this statement: ‘Blue-eyed parents make ONLY blue-eyed children’ isn’t always true – 2 blue-eyed parents can give birth to a kid with other coloured eyes. it’s not particularly common, but not too rare either.

    Comment by Tony — June 19, 2007 @ 14:33

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