The result will be one white child and one black."Īlyson got used to the comments and the stares, the sniggers about their parentage and the "stupid things people said" when her boys were babies but then, when Daniel and James went to nursery aged three, the twins' skin colour plunged the family into controversy. "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. Added to the mother's European DNA, this led to a child with white skin – while his brother, who is black-skinned, inherited more of his father's African DNA. "The thing about skin colour is that even a bit of African DNA tends to make a person's skin colour black – so to be white, the child must have inherited more of the father's European DNA with its white skin variants. "But most Caribbean people, though black-skinned, have European DNA because in the days of slavery, many plantation owners raped female slaves, and so introduced European DNA into the black gene pool. "It wouldn't really be possible for a black African father and a white mother to have a white child, because the African would carry only black skin gene variants in his DNA, so wouldn't have any European DNA, with white skin variants, to pass on," he explains. So how does it happen that a white and a black partner – who would usually produce, as Alyson and Errol did in their other children, black-skinned offspring – have a child who is as white as his mum? I spoke to Dr Jim Wilson, population geneticist at Edinburgh University – and his first question was, "What is Errol's heritage?" Errol is Jamaican – and that, says Jim, is the basic explanation. "They didn't always say anything, but I could tell it was what they were thinking." "People didn't believe Daniel was mine," he says. For Errol the response of strangers was harder to deal with. "We'd go on holiday and people would say, 'Is that one a friend you brought along?'" says Alyson. "At least life was made a bit easier by the fact that we always had two of everything."īut it was clear that having one black and one white twin was going to mark the family out, wherever they went. "Apart from her, it's twin city," says Alyson. The only singleton in the house is the couple's youngest child, and only daughter, 14-year-old Katie. Errol's first set are fraternal boys, Shane and Luke, who are 21 Alyson's are identical boys, Charles and Jordan, 20. Daniel and James were the family's third set of twins: Errol and Alyson each already had a set with a previous partner. It wasn't the first time nature had shocked Alyson and Errol.
It was another two hours before Daniel was born: and what a surprise he was! He was so white and wrinkly, with this curly blond hair." "When James was born he was the spitting image of Errol, and I remember seeing his curly hair and thinking – he's just like his dad.
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