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24 October 2006
Who’s Your Daddy, Baby Brown Eyes? 
If both your parents have blue eyes and you don't, you might want to ask your mother some very probing questions. According to research from the University of Tromso, Norway, blue-eyed men instinctively find women who also have blue eyes more attractive, and for good reason. In the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, researchers claim that blue-eyed males find their female counterparts more attractive as a result of an unconscious adaptation related to paternity detection. Genetics says that if both parents have blue eyes, then their children will also have blue eyes. But because the brown eye gene is dominant, any child born with brown eyes to parents who both have blue eyes is not the offspring of their blue-eyed father. Based on this law, researchers reason that blue-eyed males are instinctively attracted to blue-eyed partners, because it will allow them to easily spot sexual infidelities.
To test their hypothesis, researchers asked 88 male and female students to rate close-up images of models for attractiveness. The study showed that it was only blue-eyed men who showed any significant preference for women of the same eye color. A further study involving 443 young adults confirmed these results, when participants were asked to reveal the eye color of their romantic partner. Once again, blue-eyed men had by far the largest proportion of partners with the same eye color. "It is remarkable that blue-eyed men showed such a clear preference for women with the same eye color, given that the present experiment did not request participants to choose prospective sexual mates, but only to provide their aesthetic or attractiveness responses... based on face close-up photographs," says Tromso psychologist, Bruno Laeng. Source: University of Tromso
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