How do we get our eye color?
Punnet squares aren't the best way to predict a kid's eye color. (Candice Picard/Unsplash/)Most of us learned what we know about eye color from a chart in grade-school biology. You know, the one that shows that two brown-eyed parents will likely have brown-eyed kids, and two blue-eyed parents are pretty much destined to have blue-eyed kids. It might have come with little color codes, clear-cut percentages, and neat lines of inheritance. But the story of how eye color is passed down is more complicated—and unpredictable—than we’re taught.Why eyes look different colorsHumans get their eye color from melanin, the protective pigment that also determines skin and hair shades. Melanin is good at absorbing light, which is especially important for the iris, the function of which is to control how much brightness can enter the eyes. Once it passes through the lenses, the majority of the visible light spectrum goes to the...