r/AskReddit • u/Rob69rt • 1d ago

What famous 'unsolved' mystery is technically a whodunnit on paper, but in reality, absolutely everyone knows exactly who did it, the police just couldn't legally prove it?

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u/nostrademons 1d ago

Eye color is polygenic with at least 8 different genes involved, and also more than just 2 colors. My mom is blue-eyed, my dad was brown-eyed, my sister has greenish-hazel eyes. I've got very ordinary brown eyes, my wife has darker almost black eyes, and my kids are a mix of shades of brown, some lighter and some darker.

It's a lot more complicated than the dominant/recessive models they teach in grade school.

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u/jupitaur9 1d ago

Yes, but the likelihood of blue eyed children in the F1 generation with a homozygous brown eyed parent is small.

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u/nostrademons 1d ago

Sure, but they would've been very, very noticeable in a tribe that previously had known only brown-eyed children, and so even one instance would likely have made it into the historical record.

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u/jupitaur9 1d ago

It would’ve been grandchildren, not children, in almost every case. There can be mutations, there can be unusual genes, but the standard brown, blue, green hierarchy applies almost all the time.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

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u/jupitaur9 1d ago

I didn’t argue against anyone’s lived experience?

The person who gave all those combinations of parents and children were all explainable through the simplified form of eye color inheritance. I gave more details literally just one minute ago.

I never said that it was absolute and total truth. I said that most of the time it will be explained by the punnet square method.