what makes blue eyes - somewhat surprising

recent quotes i like

"Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words." - ? | | | | | | |
"If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it's that you can have great answers and still be mean... and that just as important as being right is being nice. " - shane claiborne | | | | | | |
"If Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." --George Orwell ||||||
"On Facebook, no one can hear you scream." - I dont know ||||||
"The reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it." - Machiavelli ||||||

Darwin, like many Europeans, had blue eyes. In early 2008, Hans Eiberg and his colleagues at the University of Copenhagen announced that they had found the genetic mutation common to all pure blue-eyed people. The mutation is a single letter change, from A to G, on the long arm of chromosome 15, which dampens the expression of a gene called OCA2, involved in the manufacture of the pigment that darkens the eyes. By comparing the DNA of Danes with that of people from Turkey and Jordan, Eiberg calculated that this mutation happened only about 6,000-10,000 years ago, well after the invention of agriculture, in a particular individual somewhere around the Black Sea. So Darwin may have gotten his blue eyes because of a single misspelled letter in the DNA in the baby of a Neolithic farmer.

excerpted from http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/02/darwin-legacy/ridley-text/1

and from a different source, here is a little graph of who does and does not accept the theory of evolution: