• Question: have people evolved different eye colours to avoid harmful radiation from the sun.

    Asked by leonard004 to Ed, Katie, Sam, Steve, Vera on 19 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Sam Tazzyman

      Sam Tazzyman answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I’m afraid I have absolutely no idea what the benefits of eye colour are – or even if there are any. I imagine that brown eyes was the original eye colour, because blue eyes are most often associated with white people, and white skin colour evolved more recently.

    • Photo: Vera Weisbecker

      Vera Weisbecker answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I’m not sure either but I know that people with blue eyes are more sensitive to bright light. But whether this is a side effect of the skin being darker (as it normally is with dark eyes) or an actual protective featuer I don’t know.

    • Photo: Steven Daly

      Steven Daly answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      I think it is probably a side effect of having to develope lighter skin to absorb more UV light to produce more vitamine D. What controls the colour of our skin is something called pigment, and I think that eye colour is related to some degree by the amount of pigment in the skin. This is why you have a lot of fair people with blue eyes. I am not 100% sure on this though.

    • Photo: Ed Morrison

      Ed Morrison answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      I’ll go with Steven’s answer. I don’t know there are any advantages or disadvantages to different eye colours, so it’s possibly a by-product of colouration for skin and hair. Another possibility is that it is due to sexual selection, which is where a certian feature is preferred by the opposite sex, and so they individuals with this feature have more offspring and it become more common in the population.

    • Photo: Katie Marriott

      Katie Marriott answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      I don’t know either!

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