GENETIC ADVICE

QUESTION:
A close friend confides in you that he thinks that one of "his" children is not his. When
pressed for details he points out to you that both he and his wife have dark brown hair and that
his baby has blonde hair. In the conversation he adds that although his mother was a blonde
and his wife's father was a blonde, that it is pretty obvious that neither he nor his wife have
blonde genes. What do say to your friend? Use a chart or diagram to support your conclusions.
ANSWER:
The topic of genetics can be very complicated because so many different factors go into
making a person who he or she is. To begin, every human contains 46 chromosomes; 23 from the
mother and 23 from the father. In those chromosomes comes all the information necessary to
create another unique human being in the form of DNA. The DNA in each of the different
chromosomes contains different sections within those strands. These sections are called genes
and they are the parts that provide the specific instructions for everything that happens in the
body. Everyones genotype, or the entire collection of a persons genes, is different and only
certain genes are expressed or turned on. The way those genes are expressed or used is called
the phenotype. The phenotype is how someone actually looks or acts.
It seems like too much trouble goes into creating just one person but this is what creates
variation and what makes everyone unique. There are different ways that the body decides to use
certain genes and not others. An example provided in Kathleen Bergers Invitation to the Life
Span is eye color. Eye color is an additive gene, meaning that all of the genes that have to do
with eye color add together to give someone their color (2010, p. 56). This implicates that there
can be more than 100 genes that contribute to ones eye color.
Another way that genes are expressed is though the dominant-recessive pattern. This
means that the dominant genes are more likely to be expressed than the recessive genes. The
dominant gene is what will show as the phenotype
even if the recessive gene is inherited, that makes
someone a carrier of the gene because, the
recessive gene is carried on the genotype (Berger,
2016, p. 56). The only time that a recessive gene
will be expressed is when the dominant gene is
absent. The image shown is a Punnett square and
with it one can see how dominant and recessive
genes interact. The dominant genes are shown as
capital B and the recessive genes as lower-case
b. When both parents contain a dominant and a
recessive gene they have a 3 in 4 chance of
having a child with the dominant BB or Bb
Figure 1: Sonrisas. Havanese Dogs Color Genetics.
trait and a 1 in 4 chance of having a child that
exhibits the recessive bb gene.
In my friends case, hair color is the dominant trait and even though he does not have

blonde hair he is a carrier for the gene because his mother was blonde. His wife is also a carrier
for the gene because her father was blonde as well. I would tell my friend that because his
mother and his wifes father were blonde both he and his wife carry the gene for blonde hair, and
because of this they have a one in four chance of having a child with blonde hair. In this case my
friend can rest assured that the child is his because there is a perfectly logical reason for his child
to have blonde hair despite both parents having brown hair.
References:
Berger, K. S. (2016). Invitation to the life span (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publishers.
Sonrisas. Havanese Dogs Color Genetics. Sonrisas Havanese. Web. 07 Sept. 2016.
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