Weekend fact-hunting is always tricky, what with no free papers to flick through, but I got something hot off the press first thing this morning, courtesy of my girlfriend, who told me that she'd read an article claiming that blue eyes are the result of a genetic mutation which occurred in the distant past. Further perusal of the article reveals that apparently every blue-eyed person is descended from one individual, as DNA tests demonstrate a change in the eye pigment at the same point in each person's DNA.
However, this isn't today's fact for two reasons: firstly, I don't really understand it, and crucially, as we concurred at Knowledge Towers, it appears to be groundless speculation of the highest order. The tell-tale sign is that Professor Elberg, the man touting this spurious claim, states that "originally, we all had brown eyes" in a brazen attempt to gloss over several millennia of human evolution. It did, however, lead me to look into eye colour in general, and particularly the odd phenomenon that gives me today's slice o' learning:
Heterochromia is the term given to the condition where a person has differently coloured left and right eyes.
Famous folk with this odd condition include Demi Moore, Kate Bosworth and, er, the singer from Rise Against (clearly they've got a rocker working in Wikipedia's typing pool). David Bowie does not suffer from heterochromia; he got his wrong eye from a playground punch-up, possibly instigated by turning up to P.E. in full make-up and calling the recent school rugby match "a freaky show". The fact that people can have different coloured eyes within their own face doesn't really add weight to the genetic mutation theory behind blue eyes, but maybe there's something in it. I think I'm just not buying it because I myself have blue peepers, and I had always hope that if I was a mutant, I might get X-ray vision, or really long arms, instead of runty eyes lacking in pigmentation. Oh well.
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