Re: How can you have a different color hair then your parents?

It depends on what hair color genes you inherit from your parents. Each person has two copies of a gene; one copy inherited from the mother and one from the father. In general, the dark color genes are dominant over the lighter colors. So for example, if one parent has dark hair and another has light hair then it's likely that the child will have dark hair. However, since the parents' hair color come from genes they inherit from their parents (the grandparents), the parent with dark hair may have the light hair gene. This parent may pass the light hair gene to the child and with a light hair gene from the other parent, the child will have light hair. This is presuming that hair color depends on a simple system with all dark hair color genes being dominant over light hair color genes. Hair color is not a simple system, it appears to be multiallelic where more than two alleles are associated with color determination -- an allele would be the dark vs. the light versions of the gene. There may even be more than one gene responsible for hair color. So a child can have different color hair from the parents. You can look at our unit on human gene inheritance in DNA from the Beginning for an animated explanation. http://vector.cshl.org/dn aftb/13/animation