In Living Races of Man Carleton S. Coon1 asserted offhand that the Baltic region exhibits a relatively high frequency of blondes who also happen to have brown eyes. In contrast, Ireland is characterized by dark-haired blue-eyed individuals (especially western Ireland). The latter assertion I find plausible, though it must be admitted that the majority of northern Europeans have dark hair and blue eyes, so it would not be implausible if the intersection of the two traits in many areas exceeded 50%. But, in any case, I don’t know much about the Baltic region, so I set about to see if I could find evidence of the brown-eyed blonde
I fond this Lithuanian modelling agency which has a facebook with a decent amount of information. I could puzzle out the terms for “blue,” “green” and “brown” (for eye color pretty quickly), though the many variations in hair color I simply compressed into “blonde” and “dark” categories. Here is the pivot table that excel popped out for me (I surveyed only the adult female models, someone else can check out the dudes if they are so inclined):Eye colorBlondeDarkTotalsBlue231336Brown41115Green111132Totals383573
I don’t see a high frequency of brown-eyed blondes, and when I was going through the facebook I was actually surprised at how many very dark women there were employed by the agency (see here). I had a hard time keeping track of the names, so perhaps they were Russian (though the woman I linked to just right now is Lithuanian if her name is any clue, check with google if you don’t believe me). As you can see, the blonde women in fact had the lowest number with brown eyes, an indication of either population substructure, or, more likely as far as I’m concerned, a genetic assocation between the alleles that code for hair and eye color (MC1R is implicated in pigmentation in general, but there are many, many, other loci, one recent count suggests 120, though many of those will likely be involved in regulation of MC1R).
I had a harder time finding Irish models, and so I figured I wouldn’t waste my time doing a comparison. Anyone who has Coon’s book on hand might want to post what he says (what numbers he offers) in the comment thread.
1 – Coon is by the way a great last name if you want to be accused of being a racist! Posted by razib at 06:11 PM