More Awesome Than You!

CAS sims have 2 sets of genes that match their eye color, hair color, etc. If you make 2 CAS sims, make a baby with them in CAS, does the resulting sim also only have 2 copies of the same gene (whichever got expressed) or does the make a baby CAS sim have 1 copy from each parent?

(my hard drive went pfft, last week. PSA: make regular backups of anything you care about)

As far as I know, it does, just don't change the eye color, hair color, or skin tone, as it will revert back to homozygous (two copies of one color).

Yes they have a copy from each parents.  I make sims in CAS by making two throwaway sims first and then deleting them when I create their child.  One time one of the throwaway parents had purple eyes.  The purple eyes showed up later in one of the children born in game. 

I do this to create some recessive genes for my CAS. Otherwise the town gets taken ovah by the dominent genes.

Thanks for the answers :) Jelendra, yes that's why I'm doing it. Though why I'm starting a new neighborhood when my old one (2 years *sob*) is gone 1 month before I start law school is beyond me. I should be doing something... lawly :P

Start a legacy with a Phoenix Wright sim then.  :P

That is such a great idea!  I never thought of doing that.

For my current hood, I did up great grandparents, grandparents & parents (4 of each gen) as throwaways in cas, all with different genetics. I've had skintones, eyecolours & hair colours from all of these throwaways show up in the first generation of born-in-game sims.

I'm very pleased. My little biodiversity experiment worked.

My 'hood that I'm setting up for Apartment Life has kind of an abnormal setup and diverse households. There's a single guy...a couple, the woman's mom, and their two children...a single mother and her child & teen...a teen mom and her identical twin toddler boys. Since I want them to interbreed with each other and no one else, gradually taking over the abandoned city they found when shipwrecked, I needed lots of genetic variety. Many, many pixels were sacrificed in the process.

Right now the game is in the naughty chair, as I spent all night building a city block of apartment buildings and retail fronts which fit together seamlessly, only to screw up two lots and use foundation bits where the LotAdjuster can't deal with them. Grrrrrr.
(http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/2552/snapshot000000069593ecepi9.th.jpg) (http://img183.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot000000069593ecepi9.jpg)

I just started a new hood and was looking to see how many generations it would take for the black hair and brown eyes to go away. All my sims started with those genes and all of them had children with black haired, brown eyed townies.
It is now generation 3 and there are 8 children. Only 1 has black hair, about half have brown eyes, and I even have 2 redheads.
Aren't the genes I started with supposed to be dominant?? I was figuring on like 5 or 6 generations before I got a dam redhead!

Well, if you take a bunch of recessives and breed them with a bunch of dominants, you are going to get a second generation that is all dom/recess. sims. Then, if you breed that second generation with each other, you have a 1/4 chance of an expressed recessive. If you breed them with homogeneous recessive townies, that goes up to approx 3/4 odds of an expressed recessive. Of course, odds are individual between eye and hair colors, so you have a chance of 1/16 for any child to be recessive/recessive in an interbreed situation, and 9/16 in a breed with a recessive/recessive townie.


In other news, am I the only one who finds it shocking how many sim players don't know which eye and hair colors are recessive/dominant? Are schools just not teaching basic genetics anymore?

Heh, I loved that bit in science. I always wanted to have sex-linked genes in the sims but alas, it was not to be.

I think sometime after I graduated from college, I read that new things had been learned about genetics that made predicting hair and eye color far more complex.  Apparently, it's actually possible for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child.  I don't remember the mechanics of how and why it can happen, though.  That might have something to do with it -- or there might have been too many cases of kids suddenly discovering that "daddy" was really the postman.   :P

Some people's genetics do weird things. My father is the only brunette out of 5 kids. My grandmother was a brunette, but she gave birth to 4 blondes. My father goes on to spawn my sister and myself. I was born with brown hair that turns red (mother is a red head) if I spend too much time in the sun. My sister was born BLONDE and slowly her hair darkened until it was the same shade as mine. My mother, on the other hand, is the only red head out of group of black and brown haired siblings.

Also, my mother's eyes are technically brown, but they have a large blue ring around the outside edge  of her irises. My sister's eyes are blue with a small shot of brown in the middle. Mine are brown with a smidgen of light gold. Both parents supposedly have brown eyes.

No. Dominant genes are dominant. It has nothing to do with what you started out. And, unless your redhead is holding back a lot of water, it's damn redhead.

I for one, am glad that it doesn't take that much to "breed them out." I didn't plan my current neighborhood that well. The entire 2nd generation is all black and brown haired. Thankfully, they all should have recessive blonde or red genes as well. So hopefully their spawn will have some more variety. The most interesting sprog I have currently is Pandora. She ended up with Enayla's pixie skin that has the scars on the lip and through some happy accident with binning some custom hairs, she ended up with WHITE hair. It looked good on her, so I left it, even though she is genetically black haired.

I suppose she could be suffering from some sort of follicle issue. That or really, really, really prematurely gray.

I'm starting with:

• five red/red sims
• one blond/blond
• one black/black
• two black/brown
• two brown/red
• red/red elder, out of breeding pool

All basic eye colors, but a little heavy on the gray.

The recessives are going to have to fight a bit, but they should stay firmly in play. The third generation is likely to be very red-heavy, just like Teardrop Isle is. All twelve sims are now living on one big tree-covered lot in a lean-to, living off nothing but fish and some bags of chips they found floating in the shipwreck debris. It's questionable what is in the bottles the three toddlers drink.  A long road extends into the fog, but until they have enough supplies to chance a trek along it, they're pretty much staying put. Plus, the elder and the toddlers couldn't make any sort of distance.

I'm still trying to figure out how I can fit the rent situation that's going to come with AL in, once they get to the mainland. The abandoned city I can explain. The simulated residents I can do. It's getting them more money without having actual jobs until it makes sense that I can't figure, what with the nonplayables not actually being alive.

I'm fascinated by hair, eye and skin colour genetics, and the last time I was reading about it, I found out that all the 'genetics' lessons I had for my biology GCSE were a bunch of lies. XD I found it kinda hard to understand, but it's something like: apart from red hair, there's no such thing as a gene for a particular hair colour. There are lots of variations in 'normal melanin' hair colour because it's like a whole row of switches that control lights in a big room. Someone with really light blond hair has all the switches one way, someone with really dark black hair has them all the other, but if you have just some one way you have kinda dark or kinda light hair. And I don't think people are 100% sure how these are passed down, because I couldn't find an easy explanation XD The way I understood it, you can basically get 3 'on' switches from your dad, 2 from your mum, and end up with 5, even if they only had 3 and 2 respectively - so your hair colour is way darker than either of theirs :S I find eye colour even more confusing - the thing I always have to remember is that melanin is yellow and not brown, or I can't get my head around green eyes (in fact, I still can't, but I remember that was one of the things I told myself to remember :().

All of this is why I don't understand why people can't get their heads around Sims 2 genetics (which, unless I'm completely mistaken, is the thing with the squares from my GCSEs). And I'm glad to hear that CAS genetic-mixing counts when breeding that sim later on! I did that for a few YA sims who I never bred, so I never worked out if it had any effect XD

That is basically how it works, yes. It means she's not REALLY a blonde. Many kids have lighter hair than what they ultimately end up with. It's part of the evolutionary whatzit of blondness.

I've never placed much stock in high school level genetics. I was told that left-handedness was a recessive gene. My brother and I have two left-handed parents. We are both right-handed.

I know all too well the dominance of hair colour in the Sims (black/brown over blonde/red) but I must admit, I've only a vague idea of how the eyes go. I never really notice eye colour, unless the skin/eye pairing is only half alien. Eyes are just too small to care about, I don't play with it zoomed in close enough to tell the difference beyond alien/not-alien.

Does the green alien skin get passed down recessivly?

I've had aliens mate with normal sims, and then the sim child come out normal toned, then the grandchild come out green!

My sister was very blonde as a child, but now she's dark brown. I was dark red as a child, and now I'm blonde (or ginger, if you happen to be FB...).


I was taught basic genetics, but since I don't do a Science in my Senior Schooling most of that stuff went out the window. I need to make room for Microeconomics, the History of the Catholic Church and Modern History. We get a shit load of stuff drilled into our heads on a daily basis and most of us can't retain things that won't count towards Uni/our current subjects.

The thing about the game genetics is that the system is a simple Mendellian one.  Real life genetics are generally much more complex. 

My sims usually have larger-than-normal eyes. I have a few small-eyes in play at the moment due to some issues with putting in a set of face templates I'd meant to get rid of plus not having face blend limitations off. But by and large, large-eyed sims.  Yeah, I still am not going to see them all the time as I play at a zoom that encompasses a floor of a house. Even with my homes being relatively tight floorplans, I'm not close enough to see the eyes. I do take a lot of pictures, though, and then I'm zoomed in.

I had black hair when I was born. From birth to age 18, my hair would change color pretty drastically. I'd rotate between a very light brown, chocolate brown, pitch black, and a strong auburn. Always with a slight-to-strong tinge of red. It's pretty stable for the past ten years at a medium brown/auburn.

We were taught that the hair genome was much more complicated than the eye genome and shown how they were arranged, but it was explained that it was still difficult to take that information and say exactly what expressed color a person would have, seeing as no one portion was overarchingly dominant. For the purposes of exercises, we simplified to the same system the game uses.

I look at pictures of myself when I was 5 6 and am shocked by how much of a carrot top I was then.  It's faded out over the years to somewhere in between blond and red. Some people call me blond.  Others call me red.  I still call it red because it very noticeably there.  And because it says so on my drivers licenses.   :P  Poor sim Trepie didn't get that option.  Eaxis didn't see fit to have any in between hair colors.

The genetics thing is interesting though.  Both of my parents are black haired and brown eyed.  I'm sure a lot of people looked twice when they saw them carrying a toddler around with fire red hair and blue eyes.  Both of my grandfathers had the same fire red hair and blue eyes though.  I guess it decided to skip a generation and single me out.  All of my cousins are dark haired with brown eyes.

Funny how the hair on my head decided to fade out while my facial hair didn't.  The "other" hair didn't fade out either.  ifyaknowwhatimean   ;)

Fellow redhead here... my father has brown hair/blue eyes, my mother has blond hair/green eyes. They had three redheaded children with blue eyes. Not as unexpected as your family genetics, but unusual in that all of us got red hair. We all had similar hair color as children, but one brother has faded to a bright strawberry blond, the other brother to a dirty blond with a reddish tinge. My hair has darkened some with age, so it's not as fiery as it once was, but it's still definitively red.

My mother's sister has red hair, and she married a man with very dark brown hair (Eaxis would call it black). They had three children: two have blond hair, one has brown. We always joked that we should just swap the kids in the two families. :)

The whole world knows what you mean. My dad still has nearly pure black hair on his head, but a full gray beard. I'm not sure about the "other" hair, and I don't exactly want to know, but he's pretty much a hairy ape and all his other body hair is still black.

Blue eyes were the only eye color in my family for the past three generations. So obviously I got them. That's where one of my favorite sim-genetic comments comes from ("a real crapshoot, that") when two same dominants breed or two homogeneous recessives breed. My grandaunt used to make comments about all the new babies' blue eyes being a huge crapshoot.

It's simply not possible for two blue-eyed people to have a brown-eyed child. But the thing that confuses a lot of people is when they call hazel or green eyes "blue." There are really basically two colours of eyes: brown and not-brown or "with pigment" and "without pigment." Not-brown is blue (or grey if you live in Europe *g*). "Brown" is every other colour: hazel, brown, green, blue-green, red-brown, gold, what-have-you.

If two blue-eyed people had a brown-eyed child, yes: either "Daddy" was the mailman or one of the parents has very light green or hazel eyes that contain a lot of blue-appearing pigment. But blue eyes basically *lack* pigment and therefore appear "blue" or "grey."

A basic eye colour website: http://www.athro.com/evo/inherit.html (http://www.athro.com/evo/inherit.html)

PS: I have brown hair; both my parents have brown hair, my mother's almost black. My grandparents all had brown hair on both sides of the family. The last known redhead in my family was my mother's grandmother. My husband is dirty blond and has a sibling with "gingery" hair but it's not what you'd call red.

Imagine our surprise, therefore, when our first child was a shiny new copper-penny redhead. He's 16 and is still shiny copper penny red (somewhat darker but still a lovely shade of copper-red) and so are his incipient whiskers. His sister was born a dirty blonde that's turning darker as she ages and will probably end up being brown. So the red hair skipped three generations and showed up out of the blue. Probably my father does not carry the ability to allow hair to be expressed as red, since my parents had five kids, including two blondes, and not a redhead among us. Yet my husband and I only had two kids and bam, we got a red head. Not only that, but it's curly too.

Our family joke, since we were living in Germany when he was born, is when people ask, "Where did he get the red hair? The milkman?" we answer, "No, the beer man!"

Blue eyed parents, brown eyed kids:

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2000-06/961696074.Ge.r.html (http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2000-06/961696074.Ge.r.html)

http://askville.amazon.com/SimilarQuestions.do?req=true-blue-eyed-parents-child (http://askville.amazon.com/SimilarQuestions.do?req=true-blue-eyed-parents-child)  This one explains how ANY blue gene can result in brown eyed kids.

http://www.wonderquest.com/brown-eyed-babies.htm (http://www.wonderquest.com/brown-eyed-babies.htm)

http://genetics.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_genetics_of_blue_eyes (http://genetics.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_genetics_of_blue_eyes)

The gist of it all is:

From the same website you linked:

http://www.athro.com/evo/gen/inherit1.html#uncertainty

Research is interesting! 

My mother has green eyes, brown hair, my father has blue eyes, light brown hair. Between them, they produced three brunettes, three blondes (hair remains blonde in adulthood), one redhead, and two ash blondes.  All of us except the redhead started out with blonde hair as kids.

Amongus are seven with blue eyes, one with green eyes, and one with brown eyes--and she's one of the colorfast blondes.

So it can happen that two people with 'recessive color' eyes can have a brown eyed kid. But they only managed it one in nine.

Is it possible that eye colour also has penetrance issues? 
So it's not necessarily that the milk man is the parent, but more that Daddy (or Mummy) has a brown gene that hasn't shown up, but does manage to work in the child.

That's what I had heard, that there is a possibility that someone can have the genes for brown eyes, but display blue because the proteins are somehow blocked by some other condition. So a mom could be Bb, displaying blue due to the proteins being blocked, with the father bb and displaying blue of course. Child inherits Bb.

Indeed!

Almost all of the examples cited, however, have to do with genetic mutations, "gene swapping" or fetal damage during pregnancy. Because of this, I am thinking the possibility of two blue eyed parents having a brown eyed baby because of an incompletely expressed gene  is more uncommon than the other causes.

But you're right and I was wrong: the question, can two blue eyed parents have a brown eyed child, can be answered "yes." :)

That would surprise me less than two blue eyed parents having a brown eyed child, because while green is dominant over blue and brown is dominant over green, green still indicates the presence of melanin and blue is still the absence of melanin. So if there are enough polygenes piling onto the pigmentation (the way they do in the rufus gene in red cats) - which I've always thought was one possible explanation for the great variations in eye colour - then I can see that green could be 'hiding" brown.

At any rate, yes, it is possible - I was wrong.

This conversation has surely turned interesting. And it's such a relief when someone can in a good-natured way say "I was wrong" instead of maintaining an answer or becoming abusive, especially on the internets  ;) So props.