Many years ago there was a book and a movie, Island in The Sun.
If memory serves, which it may well not, the plot revolved around the possibility that a white woman and a white-looking man who had some black ancestry would have a child who looked black.
My understanding is that the child of such a couple must be no darker than the darker parent and no lighter than the lighter parent. (This is not true if both parents have mixed ancestry.)
Is my understanding and memory of the book and movie correct? If so, are the book and movie nonsense?
Lots of gene variants drive skin color.
But skin color is not an especially good proxy to use for determining ancestral source population.
What, exactly, does “look black” mean considering the remarkable phenotypic variations for those who have recent sub-saharan ancestry?
With genes, “must” is never a very good word to throw in.
I don’t know what the point of the movie is, but I suspect if either parent has a reasonable admixture of genes from some of the sub-saharan populations, the couple could have a kid that to someone, somewhere, “looks black.”
I have 6 siblings my mother is Italian and my father is Irish. We are all light skinned but with brown hair and tan easily except for one sister who is very dark. Much darker than both parents.
You say that both parents look white, but that the father has some African ancestry. Does the mother? You don’t know, and probably neither does she. But a lot of “white” Americans do.
It’s also possible for two people to both come “purely” from light-skinned populations, but for the populations to be light-skinned for different reasons. In this case, their children could also be darker than either. I don’t know of any specific examples for skin color, but this is how a blond and a redhead can have a child with brown hair: Blond hair is due to a gene (or set of genes) that decreases the amount of melanin, and red hair is due to a gene that changes the color of melanin, so a kid can get the redheaded parent’s amount of melanin and the blond parent’s kind of melanin.
That was interesting but I am sure I recall reading of a girl in such a family who was forcibly removed from her parents because they were “white” and she was declared “coloured”. In the case linked above, she was allowed to remain her family.
It is, of course, true that white-looking people can have some non-white ancestry.
But my question assumes an all-white heritage (at least for hundreds of yeas) for one parent,say Eastern European.
IF this describes one parent and the other has a white phenotype but some non- white ancestry, is it true that the offspring can not be lighter than the lighter parent or darker than the darker parent?
Under the simplest assumptions, no, it’s not possible. But the simplest assumptions don’t always reflect the real world, and in the real world, yes, it is possible.
Surprised I’m the first one to bring up Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* where there’s a scene where the sperm are positioned to ejaculate. There’s a black sperm that says “What am I doing here? What am I doing here?” (although I remember the line as “I’m here to make things interesting” but I can’t find this in the clip.)
Here’s the clip, but perhaps it’s NSFW so in a spoiler:
I took this to mean that there’s some randomness in the whole thing.
Another notable “where did that come from?” incident is in the novel The Big Sky, the main character’s Indian wife has a child with red hair, like his best friend has, so he kills the best friend and leaves his wife. Returning to his mother, the mother offhandedly says that red hair runs in their family. Again, randomness, but perhaps not really random.
I think like ten years ago there was an article where two black parents gave birth to twins and one was white, not albino, but white with blond hair and blue or green eyes.
Your “understanding” of dark/light skin color in the children of mixed race parents cannot be reliably predicted (at this time) scientifically.
The premise(s) you set forth appear to be founded in Hollywood, not in reality.
If your question is, “Could the 7th person in line to the Throne of St. Edward, having Dominion over the Commonwealth and Defender of the Faith have the same skin color as Don Cheadle?” Then the answer is “Yes.” Before you get the vapors though, it’s very unlikely. It’s typical for skin color to echo that of their parents, but not be “an average” whatever that means. My wife and I are both whiter than Snow White in a snowstorm and while my older son gets sunburned when he walks too close to a candle, my younger son has an almost Mediterranean skin tone. This makes sense since I have Spanish ancestry though my skin color doesn’t display it.
Take me for example. I have red hair and fair skin, significantly fairer than my dark-haired dad. The reason I have fair skin and red hair both come from a single gene mutation I inherited from my mother’s maternal side of the family, and my brother’s a redhead too, as were our mom and a great-grandmother.
Given I also have blue-green eyes I couldn’t possibly look more white, but I have a black great-great grandfather, and 1/2 of my mom’s family has the olive and darker skin tones common to where the family lived in Bermuda and the Azores before immigrating to the US - some of my mom’s paternal cousins were not infrequently mistaken for African Americans when they were young and liked to tan. If I had kids who did not inherit the MC1R gene mutation too, who knows what skin tone they’d have? It’d most certainly be darker than mine.
:eek: Oh my gosh I wonder if that’s why I find it so hard to tan!! Forgive me since this is a bit of a tangent, but since this post is several days old I’m hoping it’s okay.
My mother was a redhead (with redhead skin), and my father has fairly dark skin because of some Middle Eastern ancestry (he looks like Stedman Graham, to give you an example). All three of us children wound up with the same sort of skin: fairly pale and practically impervious to sun, as in it neither burns easily nor tans easily.
I wonder if our skin is a result of this gene mutation (which, as the Wikipedia article says, “The MC1R recessive variant gene that gives people red hair generally results in skin that is unable to tan”) co-presenting with another gene that results in skin unable to burn. Do you know if it’s possible for this gene mutation to present only partially? (Sorry if I’m mutilating the technical terms for all this, it’s clearly not my area of expertise!)