[Athena]

Hi my dear friends who perfer the scientific explanation to the religious explanation of how we come to be as we are. Here is nature's explanation for the selection blue eyes or brown eyes.

Understanding Genetics: Human Health and the Genome One theory is that people with blue eyes also tend to have lighter skin (the same pigment that makes brown eyes also makes dark skin). In places with less sunlight, lighter skin can help the body make Vitamin D. You need vitamin D to avoid bone diseases like rickets. In fact, lack of vitamin D used to be a big problem before refrigeration and vitamin D-fortified milk. So, lighter skin means you are less likely to get rickets. Let’s say you randomly get a mutation that gives you blue eyes and light skin. Now if you live where there isn't much sunlight (Northern Europe, for example), you will be healthier than your dark-skinned neighbors. ........ One idea is that light skin allows sunlight to destroy a vitamin called folate. You need folate to have healthy babies. If women don’t get enough folate while they are pregnant, the baby can be born with birth defects. And if men don’t get enough folate, they don’t make as many sperm. This would mean that people with blue eyes and light skin living in bright areas would have less healthy kids. So the genes for blue eyes would be less likely to get passed on in sunny places.

Note we can compensate with vitamin D in our milk and clothing covering our bodies, and increase everyone's survival in the different regions; making our differences less important.

As for Dieval"s question. We can know the eye color of any dead human as long as there is a sample of DNA. That is because we can read the chormosone. We know where the gene for different hair and eye colors is on the chormosome. So if we find a mummy in a desert or a bog, we can extract DNA from a tooth, and then read the chromosome, to know things like hair and eye color.