𝙒𝙝𝙤’𝙨 𝙮𝙚𝙧 𝙈𝙖𝙢𝙖? Gen just wasn’t 100% certain, so we […]

𝙒𝙝𝙤’𝙨 𝙮𝙚𝙧 𝙈𝙖𝙢𝙖?

Gen just wasn’t 100% certain, so we gathered some teething drool and did a little check with 23andMe. Lo and behold — Luna is her daughter! Big relief all around.

And we learned some cool details about her lineage: about 40% of her genes are of Eastern European origin and 6% Finnish (thanks to me), and from her mom, Luna is ~20% Irish (grandma) and 27% Ashkenazi Jewish (grandpa). She has no Ukraininan DNA even though that is grandpa’s country of origin. You can see the accumulated effects of historical breeding patterns in the DNA distribution: Ashkenazi Jew is the only cluster that is independent of geography. In other words, an analysis of humanity’s genetic variation from eons of local inter-breeding shows clustering by geography, but with negligible inter-mixing with the Ashkenazi population. So, even though grandpa is from the Ukraine, he has no genes in common with non-Jewish Ukrainians.

It’s also interesting to see the phenotypic predictions before they play out: 85% chance of brown hair and eyes (she is carrying my recessive gene for green eyes) and 90% likelihood of straight to slightly wavy thin hair, not particularly thick, and prone to photo-bleaching. Only a 6% chance of being a red-head, even though she looks a bit that way at 9 months. We’ll see.

And in baby headlines, Luna said her first word at a camping trip this weekend, and now it’s all she says: DaDa! Sometimes DaDaDaDaDaDaDa, but I’ll take it. 🙂