Black, White Brothers Are Actually Twins

[flamingdem]

http://www.kmbc.com/news/29327704/detail.html

* Picture at link

excerpt:
The boys were born to Alyson and Errol Kelly, an interracial couple, and display the unusual characteristic of being a pair of one dark-skinned and one-light skinned twins, the Guardian reported.

Dr. Jim Wilson, a population geneticist at Edinburgh University, told the newspaper the cause is the father's heritage. Errol Kelly, Jamaican by background, holds the genetic key to skin color variations because people of Caribbean descent are often likely to carry European DNA.

"The Caribbean father will have less European DNA than African DNA, so it's more likely he'll pass on African DNA -- but rarely, and I've worked it out to be around one in 500 sets of twins where there's a couple of this genetic mix, the father will pass on a lot of European DNA to one child and mostly African DNA to the other," Wilson said. "The result will be one white child and one black."

The boys are different in more ways than just their skin color.

James, the darker skinned twin, is gay, outgoing and excels at academics. Daniel is straight, introverted and doesn't care much for school.

Read more: http://www.kmbc.com/news/29327704/detail.html#ixzz1aSWwu1bU

[tblue]

1. I think I remember when they were born.

Dang, are they gorgeous or what?

[flamingdem]

4. They really do not look that much alike

Maybe the smile.

[Greybnk48]

7. I remember this too. Did you read about the rest of the

family? Each parent has a set of twins from a previous marriage and one non-twin child, a daughter. Three sets of twins! Yikes!

My SIL comes from a family with 3 sets of twins, but her mom had eleven kids--eight pregnancies. She has a twin brother, and the other two sets are boy/girl as well. They all have rhyming names like "Kate & Nate" and "Terry & Kerry" LOL!

I LOVE families like this.

[enlightenment]

2. Just saw an article about another set of twins - also boys.

A few months ago, it was a set of twin girls. Adorable babies, all.

It is becoming increasingly common - and it's lovely to see. I recall that many, many years ago we believed (at least I and my friends did) that eventually everyone would 'blend' and differences in skin tone would become a thing of the past. It appears that nature is starting to work it out in a fascinating way.

[Blue Owl]

3. I could be black I could be white

I could be wrong I could be right...

(just happened to be listening to some PIL while reading this thread...)

[Alenne]

5. Neither looks "white"

One is just lighter than the other. This would only be amazing if they were identical twins, which they clearly are not.

[Shandris]

25. Speaking from the heart of the Bible Belt...

...I have no idea what picture you're looking at if you don't see that one of them is 'white'. I know about 10 guys who look just like him. I grew up in just about the most whitewashed area you can in Indiana (in 12 years of school I knew 2 black students...and neither stayed longer than a semester), and the one brother wouldn't have gotten a second glance from anyone around here.

OTOH, as I got older and moved away from this area for a while, I knew a pair of brothers who were more like you describe - one very, very dark and the other a much lighter dark. Neither would have been accepted as 'white' where I grew up at.

[Alenne]

27. Speaking from the heart of a multi racial family

neither looks white. At most someone might think the lighter one is hispanic. If you put him next to a "white" person you would see the difference. Both look ethnic.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

6. What a fascinating story!

Genetics has always interested me...

[SidDithers]

8. Similar situation for twin girls born in 2006...

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1813509




Nature is a far more interesting place than many people realize.

Sid

[Poll_Blind]

9. "Nature is a far more interesting place than many people realize."

+1

PB

[DirkGently]

10. Black & white, gay & straight. Brothers. Nice ring to it.

[FrenchieCat]

11. Interesting! One could pass for White, and one could not.

My sibling and I are biracial, but the difference with us is that although we aren't twins, we could easily pass as such...

I'm not smiling in this pic, so we don't look as alike here as we actually did in person. My mother even kept my hair short like a boy, because she didn't quite know how to manage it at the time. This was in France in the 60s. Note that they put the Black doll behind us, something they didn't do for the other kids. We were the only brown skins at the school at the time, and my Mom raised a fuss about it at the time after seeing a couple of the neighbor kids' pic sans Black doll!





And interestingly enough, my mother's sister also married a Black man, and her five kids (which includes one set of fraternal twins) look like quintuplets; exact skin color, hair texture, eye color and facial features.

Genetics is soooo interesting!

[flamingdem]

12. Georgous photo. Nice genetics!

I just checked to see if this was still being offered:

http://www.dnatribes.com/?g-dt&gclid=CNDt_qCP4asCFQoZQgodymx6Nw

$150 to find out ones dna. Wonder what kind of accuracy and type of results it yields

[JCMach1]

13. My son is half African (darkest Kenyan) and white (me)

Nature is a strange thing and race (genetically) means almost nothing... not much different than the color of one's hair...

[FrenchieCat]

14. He's a real cutie! :)

[JCMach1]

15. Our running joke is he will become president of Kenya someday...

the reverse Obama...

[JuniperLea]

21. The world will be a much better place...

Once we are all that lovely shade that meets somewhere in the middle!

That kid is going to be a heartbreaker! What a cutie!

[MadMaddie]

26. Very handsome young man you got there

[Xithras]

16. You never know how the genes will combine.

My wife has a close friend who exemplifies this.

Her friends mother was white. Her father was African American. She looks solidly African American, and you can't tell there's a drop of white in her.

The friends husband also looks African American, though a bit lighter. His mother is white. His father is half-white, half-black. You can sort of tell that he's mixed, but he's still very dark and nobody would ever confuse him for a white guy.

Their first daughter was as white as a Finn. Straight light brown European hair, pale skin, and freckles. Their next two kids, another daughter and a son, are as dark as their mother (darker than their father). If you just saw the three standing together, you'd never guess they were all siblings...unless you looked really closely and noticed that the younger two have freckles too :)

[AngryAmish]

17. Tho not twins, you should see my kids in the bathtub together

lil AA1 is real dark, lil AA2 is pale as me.

[FarCenter]

18. Have they done the DNA paternity tests -- about 10% of babies are fathered by someone else

Someone other than the man generally thought to be the father.

[mainegreen]

19. RTA

We're talking twins here. Odds of another father in this case are mighty small. Also, if you actually look at the article the two brothers are clearly related; they look surprisingly alike.

[FarCenter]

22. I RTA

It didn't say whether paternity tests have been done or not.

Since they fraternal twins, they come from two separate eggs fertilized by two separate sperm. There is no certainty that the sperm come from the same father.

Admittedly, their features did look similar, but they are at least half-brothers, so this is expected.

[Karenina]

24. This genetic "anomaly" is well-documented.

However, a paternity test is what you require to make sure there isn't a NitWP!!! :rofl:

[HipChick]

20. Twincredibles..

I don't know if it will be shown here, but in the UK, BBC2 just had an excellent documentary on this called Twincredibles ...on mixed race Britain..Bi-racials are not the largest ethic minority in the UK

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2011/09_september/05/mixed4.shtml

[flamingdem]

23. This doc looks great, hope it airs here at some point nt