Blue Eyed Family

All blue-eyed people are related!

I had a blue-eyed grandfather. That means I'm related to my wife...

It's true! Danish geneticists isolated the "gene" for blue eyes. It was a mutation on the OCA2 gene -- a single "switch" from adenine to guanine. This happened 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, around the northwest end of the Black Sea. Everybody with blue eyes is descended from this single ancestor, and brown-eyed people with a blue-eyed ancestor are also part of the "family."

So how 'bout that, ancestry dot com?

This is old news to people who follow the latest science. I ran across it in an article about Neanderthals in National Geo. A link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/2045q6234h66p744/fulltext.html

National Reformer as primary source

Among other things, the National Reformer is a really good source of primary information on Charles Bradlaugh and what was going on in his life. Aside from a three-year break due to bad health, from 1863-1866, Bradlaugh was the main editor of the paper. Correspondence, "Rough Notes," "Parliamentary Jottings" and most if not all of the unsigned columns in the NR were written by Bradlaugh. This one is an example of the authobiographical nature of some of his later writing. It's an article from November 1890 (only months before Bradlaugh's death), in which he describes his early experiences speaking on freethought topics, and the development of his ideas on atheism. Click on the image for a large, readable view.