AHC: Social differentiation based on eye color

That’s that woman who tricked the audience into thinking that brown eyed people and blue eyed people had innate differences right? I remember watching her on the Oprah Show, it was particularly entertaining.

The thing that strikes me the most would have to be that other characteristics couldn’t interfere with eye color. Skin and hair color are more striking to a person at a glance, than eye color. So those traits would either have to be ignored, admittedly may be hard to do, or not be a factor. Thus, this also has to be in an area where blue eyed make up a quantifiable amount of the population without any other characteristic interfering. Thus I look towards Northern Europe, where blue eyes are very common, maybe some invading force, establishes a rule over a native brown eyed population? It’s just that blue eyes is often found with blond hair, so that would have to be accounted for as well. The best I could come up with are blond haired blue eyed Scandinavians, maybe Vikings, occupy an area perhaps in Poland, where the population are relatively brown-eyed. This I gathered from some basic percentages on distributions of blond hairs and blue eyes. Anyways, perhaps, to differentiate from the elite of the society, blue eyes is labeled as superior, and this evolves over the years into regardless of foreign or native ancestry, blue eyes is considered the social differentiation, over other factors.
 
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The problem is, do we even have a society that goes out of its way to discriminate on minute skin color differences(which is ultimately what eye and hair color differences generally correlates to) without an already existing background of racial conflict?
 
I think it would be tricky.

The genetic architecture of eye colour is both simultaneously fairly binary and not a sure thing in terms of heritability, with it being fairly possible and not even rare for two blue eyed parents to have a brown eyed child or vice versa.

(This is fairly unlike skin colour which is much more stable in terms of offspring vs the extremes, since the genetic architecture is much more distributed).

I think it would be socially difficult for people to sanction individuals "falling down" or being "picked up", on the basis of eye colour, so you'd probably just get something at most like Indian society, etc. with "colourism".

Eye colour also isn't genetically independent of skin colour either (the "big" locii that have largest effect on eye colour are independent, but many smaller locii coinfluence lighter hair and skin), so producing a population where eye colour and *not* skin colour is correlated with social differentiation is difficult.

Finally, a likely outcome of *serious* eye colour social discrimination is a selective sweep on eye colour genes and the phenotype that was disadvantage would probably disappear over that time span, if it went on long enough.

Although I'm assuming something like social hierarchy here - a world in which folk of different eye colours were sorted into niches of equal status but different roles might not have those same issues.
 
The most amazing thing about eye colour is that blue eyes only evolved in humans about 10,000 years ago. When ceramics were first invented, there weren't any blue eyed people. Blue eyes have since rapidly spread and are thus are a highly successful evolutionary trait. It seems they have no functional advantage, but play a role just like peacock feathers - mates consider blue eyes attractive purely on aesthetics, at an incredible rate. This seems to be the case even in the Nordics and Baltics where blue eyes became a majority, suggesting a perceived attractiveness unrelated to being unique.

Given this, it seems like a society could definitely start encoding this as a racial superiority marker.
 
A butterfly flaps it's wings. 5000 years later the germans have won ww2 and imposed racial hierarchy where amongst other things blue eyes equals more aryan.
 
Blue eyes only showed up 10,000 years ago. They could be used as a sign that the bearer of those eyes is descended from the sky God. Making them a holy person / priest.
 
...The genetic architecture of eye colour is both simultaneously fairly binary and not a sure thing in terms of heritability, with it being fairly possible and not even rare for two blue eyed parents to have a brown eyed child or vice versa...

Quibble, and I may be wrong, but isn't it impossible for two blue-eyed parents to produce a brown-eyed offspring? I thought blue eyes was recessive, so blue-eyed parents would produce only blue-eyed offspring, while brown-eyed parents that both carry the gene for blue eyes should theoretically produce 25% blue-eyed offspring.
 
Quibble, and I may be wrong, but isn't it impossible for two blue-eyed parents to produce a brown-eyed offspring? I thought blue eyes was recessive, so blue-eyed parents would produce only blue-eyed offspring, while brown-eyed parents that both carry the gene for blue eyes should theoretically produce 25% blue-eyed offspring.

This is a false teaching to simplify things for school children. The best thinking right now is that there are two groups of genes. One decides brown vs non-brown. The other decides blue vs green and only appears if the first group is non-brown. Brown is usually dominant over non-brown but it isn't a 100% thing.
 
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