Answer 1:
In any country you will find people with
different eye colors. Here’s a nice Youtube
video that shows many different light eye colors
in Indian people:
watch this video.
Brown eyes are more common in India, but I
don’t have any actual numbers. I found a source
that gave some values for light-colored eyes in
the UK: Scotland--80%, England--74%, and Wales--
68%.
Eye color depends mostly on genes. In most
science textbooks it says that Brown is dominant
to blue, but you have probably noticed that
there are many shades of eye color, not just
two. This tells us that the story is not that
simple.
One thing that causes eyes to be darker is
having more brown eye color, or pigment.
Melanin is the pigment that gives our hair,
skin, and eyes their color. Some people have
slightly different recipes for melanin, so their
eyes may be a different color. The amount of
pigment also makes a difference. Eyes may be
brown, but be darker or lighter than someone
else’s depending on the amount of melanin.
The actual structure of the iris (the colored
ring) also influences the color. You know how a
glass of water looks clear, but the ocean or a
lake looks blue or green? That’s because there
are a lot of tiny particles in the water that
absorb, and scatter the light. The fluid in
your iris scatters light too. That’s where
green and blue colors come from.
There’s some evidence that darker eyes are a
little better for seeing when there is a lot of
light, because the iris absorbs more light.
Eyes with less pigment may allow a person to
see color in slightly lower light. These are
really small differences, though. The reason
darker eyes are more common in India may be due
to there being more sun. It could also just be
random chance. Mutations that caused lighter
eyes may just have happened a bit more often in
some areas of the world. It could also be that
people who didn’t make enough melanin to make
their skin dark did not survive as well in sunny
India as in foggy Europe.
Do you think social attitudes about eye color
influence eye color in later generations?
Thanks for asking,
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