ahdsj
Iron
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I've been interested in this and wanted to share my thoughts,ideas and knowledge
Blue eyes View attachment 13458
Table of content:
1. Basic knowledge about blue eyes
1.1 How do blue eyes work
1.2 Percentages
1.3 The first blue eyes
2.What made them become so widespread (and why are they attractive)?
2.1 Genetic drift
2.2 Natural Selection
2.3 Sexual selection/Why are they attractive:
2.31Sensory Bias
2.311: Inherent Bias
2.32: Contrast
2.33 Indirect or "false" selection
2.34 Phenotype:
2.35 Fischerian Runaway selection:
2.36 Culture/Development
2.37 Novelty
3.Can you change your eye colour?
Basic knowledge
1.1How do blue eyes work:
Contrary to popular belief,blue eyes aren't caused because of some special blue pigment within the irises.
Instead blue eyes lack a bit in melanin ,the brownish pigment which usually makes eyes look darker.
The iris contains structures that scatter incoming light. Melanin absorbs that light.
Due to the fact that blue eyes lack melanin shorter wavelengths of light are scattered back producing the blue appearance/colour.
There are two particularly important genes within blue eyes:
OCA2 which is involved in producing and regulating melanin
HERC2 posseses a regulatory region that can strongly influence how much of thag OCA2 is expressed in the irises.
A special variant close to HERC2 can reduce the activity of OCA2.
Less OCA2 activity obviously leads to less melanin production which causes a lighter iris as earlier explained.
View attachment 13452
1.2 Percentages:
8-10% of all people worldwide have blue eyes even though I expected them to be a bit rarer.
This is about 650 to 820 million people with blue eyes.
Continents percentage of the world's blue eyes:
Continents Precentage Europe 20-35%(especially in the North) North America 15-25% Oceania 10-20% South America 5-10% Asia 1-5% Africa <1%
All figures are only approximations
Eye Color Percentage by Country 2026 and Worldwide Percentage
1.3The first blue eyes:
Researchers generally agree that the genetic variation causing blue eyes arose 6000-10000 years ago. This person likely is a kind of Adam of blue eyes but there might be technically a fee outliers.
If you've studied history,you'll know 6000 years or 10000 years is a pretty big time distance but in terms of evolutionary sight,blue eyes are pretty novel and new and would be predicted to be much less commonly spread than 10% of the population if we assumed they were genetically neutral traits and there has been no established natural advantage of blue eyes so what actually made them so rare?
Here are a few hypothesise.
This will be from now on super speculative so take this with a grain of salt.
2. What made them become so widespread (and why are they attractive)?
2.1 Genetic drift
The first possible explanation is Genetic drift.
It's arguably the most popular and most easily defensible explanation as to why blue eyes became widespread.
Blue eyes were never specifically selected for like other traits but through chance,blue eyes spread more than they were supposed to.
This idea is more established in small populations as luck plays more role.
I don't fully believe it myself though.
2.2 Natural Selection
This is a much more speculative hypothesis.
My idea is that blue eyes indicated something which was directly related to survival or capability to reproduce.
An example would be the contrast making you seem to predators as more alert or as having noticed them thus making them more cautious to attack fearing combat and preferring an unaware prey consideredhumans were one of the harder prey which could cooperate amongst themselves,making blue eyed people ultimately a bit more likely to survive.
This may or may not have caused a sexual selection as blue eyes became an indicator of likelihood of survival or maybe it purely stayed a natural selection process.
I didn't write this again in the sexual selection part as I felt it was unnecessary to write this seperate of natural selection solely because of this,considering the high similarity of both concepts(excluding attractiveness)
2.3 Sexual selection/Why are they attractive:
2.31Sensory Bias
2.311: Inherent Bias
Humans could have had developed before blue ever existed a preference for certain colours in general on the face or could have an in-built preference for certain eyes colours without known reason. A reason could be association to something else but there isn't a specific thing I could think of for this.
2.32: Contrast(kind of part of Sensory Bias but I was too lazy too change the categorisation)
Lighter coloured irises have stronger contrast to black pupils in comparison to brown irises.
This may make lighter colors more appealing.
We'll slightly get to that again later.
This could especially play a role in dark environments as maybe blue eyes weren't themselves selected but you could be more intimate in the dark and see someone when they had higher contrast i.e. blue eyes.
2.33 Indirect or "false" selectionProof of contrast:
View attachment 13463
This belongs maybe a bit to Sensory Bias but I wanted to make this very clear.
Sexual selection may have absolutely nothing to do at all with advantages or indicators,contrast or anything else I mentioned.
It could be that simply a thing which was pleasant or associated with good things was blue or was better when it was blue or light coloured making an association between blue and attractiveness.
This though is barely established and as said before I have no more concrete hypothesis on what this could be that created false sexual selection as I use the term.
I call it false selection not because the selection is false but because neither the preference helps nor the trait itself if it wasn't for the existence of the preference but professionals wouldn't like the term I'm using.
2.34 Phenotype:
Blue eyes are associated with certain phenotypes or more prominent in certain phenotypes.
If such phenotypes were more preferred for being more attractive or tied to people with higher socioeconomic or financial power,this could create a sexual selection of blue eyes.
I obviously cannot prove if a tribe which first developed blue eyes was economically powerful or not so this remains speculative.
2.35 Fischerian Runaway selection:
Runaway selection is the idea that as long as both a trait X is heritable as well as the preference for trait X, in theory both the trait and the preference for it could continue being inherited where the preference and the advantage of such preference further enforces the trait's selection itself.
This can be technically applied/added to all of the other explanations.
Fisherian runaway - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
2.36 Culture/Development
I don't think this needs a lot of explanation.
Attractiveness of blue eyes were probably to an extent amplified by social media or by whatever you've learned and seen growing up.
This doesn't fully explain why they still spread that much in the more early years of blue eyes before social media or highly spread media
2.37 Novelty
This idea is simple as well. Often people desire that which is rare.
Blue eyes are rarer and were even rarer back then which may have made them fro certain people more desirable.
3.Can you change your eye colour
View attachment 13462
As far as I know there are guides on how to theoretically change your eye colour and certain methods to use.
I'm not really specialised in that nor do I want to say something wrong or lead you to the unknown.
The only permanent way which I know of with certainty is either being born with them or having surgery.
I think coloured lenses are generally better though even if they aren't permanent because they carry medically much lower risk.
They still do carry slight medical risks though which aren't to ignore.
I'm sorry if the last part was a bit disappointing.
Hope you liked this if you've read so far.
Attractive people with blue eyes View attachment 13465View attachment 13466
Me
