Maxis agrees with Laurenke
Brynne:
Ugh. I wish sim surgery worked in simpe.
Oddysey:
Sim genetics run roughly thus:
There are three levels of dominance for eyes and hair. If a sim has two genes of differing dominance, the higher level will express 100% of the time. If both genes for a given trait have the same dominance, there's a 50% chance of either gene expressing.
Level 1: Custom.
Level 2: Dominant Default. For eyes, this is brown and dark blue. For hair, this is black and brown.
Level 3: Recessive Default. For eyes, this is green, grey, and light blue. For hair, this is red and blond.
Skin is different: if a sim has two custom skins, it's random which one will express. If it has one custom and one default, it will always express the custom one. If it has two defaults, it can express any skin tone in between the two. So a sim with both the lightest and the darkest skintone gene can have any skin color. This means that two sims with the lightest skin in the game can have a baby with the darkest skin, if any of their antecedents had that gene.
The real genetics behind these traits is still not completely understood, but I know a few of the basics. Brown eyes are dominant over blue and green, and green is dominant over blue. Other genes control the intensity of the color, the appearance of other colors, and probably a bunch of other things I don't know about.
Hair color is determined by (at least) two sets of genes. One controls the level of melanin, giving a range from dark brown/black to blond. The more melanin, the darker the hair. The other controls the amount of what is, if I remember correctly, basically rust--iron oxide. This produces the varying levels of red in hair.
Skin color throws a bit of a wrench into the works, because (again, if I remember correctly; I really need to look this up . . . ) skin color is tied to the overall level of melanin that the body produces. Higher levels of melanin override whatever the local levels of melanin are in the hair and eyes, making them darker and browner. Melanin isn't the only chemical that produces skin color. There's also a yellowish pigment that I don't remember the name of, and the distribution of blood vessels in the skin. So instead of just a "dark to light" spectrum, it's a three dimensional spread, although enough melanin will override any other color.
The sims is a very good example of Mendellian genetics. Unfortunately, in real life there are genes whose influences "mix," producing an intermediate color (or whatever) rather than one or the other expressing. And having multiple genes control a feature, even if all those genes obey Mendellian laws, produces results that don't follow the standard Punnet square genotype mix. These sorts of interactions are what produce the sort of uneven blending we're used to in heredity. Mendel got unbelievably lucky, because he picked six features that all followed rules he could discover with the mathematics available to him.
ZephyrZodiac:
Will Whitehouse in my game has the pale skin from Alle Meine Sims, and Hairfish's white-blond surfer hair and light grey eyes. He has recently had an alien baby, who was blond hair, light grey eyes (which are much smaller than most alien babies' eyes, and his skin I'll swear is lighter green than normal! He does have a smallish nose, but then so does his father (???) Will and his half-sister Wendy, who was created in CAS and since she only had a father, she was created by me to look as much like her dad as possible.
Oddysey:
Oh, yeah, alien genetics.
Aliens normally have green skin, and always if the other gene is default, but I think it can be suppressed by custom content. Not totally sure. They usually have black eyes, but occasionally (5, 10%? Again, need to check. TreyNutz might know . . .) they have the "default" gene they inherited from their parent. I think that custom content eyes are dominant, but not totally sure.
Alien eyes can only be expressed on sims with green skin, so a non-green sim will have Maxis brown--not the default, either, because if you change the default you still get the original maxis.
There's only one alien skin tone, so unless you have a multi-PT hack installed all your alien spawn have the same skin.
ZephyrZodiac:
Perhaps it's the light hair and eyes that make his skin look lighter too!
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