Scientists jumped to the wrong conclusion from studying too few families. In fact this is where the wrong ideasВ about attached earlobes, rolling your tongue and lots of other supposedly simple dominant and recessive traits came from. If you only look at one example you can miss the right answer! We might conclude that brown eyes are recessive because all the parents and kids had the same eye color. Only then do you have a chance at figuring out if a trait is dominant or recessive.ДЇor example, imagine that in our case both kids had brown eyes.

You need to look at lots and lots of families and lots and lots of kids. This is why you canвЂ™t just look at a single family to figure this stuff out. Blonde parents often have darker haired children (or even redheads).Д«londe hair can look recessive but it really isn't. The same isnвЂ™t really true for blonde hair. Now this isnвЂ™t that common so we could still say that blue eyes are mostly recessive. Surprisingly, blue-eyed parents sometimes have a brown-eyed child. It turns out that eye color and most hair colors are way too complicated to be simple dominant/recessive traits. Both parents had brown hair but they had a child with blonde hair.ДЄs I said, though, weвЂ™d be wrong. So this follows the first pattern meaning blue eyes are recessive. In our case here, both parents have brown eyes but they had a blue-eyed child. Another way to tell if a trait is recessive is if both parents and all their kids share that same trait. As IвЂ™ll explain in more detail later, if a trait is recessive, then it can appear even if both parents donвЂ™t have that trait. The way you figure out if a trait is dominant or recessive is you look for patterns. Unfortunately weвЂ™d be wrong about the blonde hair - and only partly right about eye color. This is a great question! From a first pass we might conclude that blue eyes and blonde hair are recessive.

Simple dominant traits