nismaratwork said:
I chose not to make assumptions, but yes it is not uncommon for blond children to have darkening hair, and I speak from personal experience that hair can change to curly or straight based on age. Women often find that the hormonal activity of pregnancy changes their hair color and texture in some ways, with darkening being the most common alteration. My mother went from a blond to a near-brunette after having me, but again this doesn't really apply.
HOWEVER... this is a bit different from the WWII era German ideal being born to a black African couple... that is as far as I know, unheard of. This child is colorless, it is clearly BLOND a la yellow-seeming hair, with clear blue eyes. I can't tell you how strange that is... I almost could believe in a switch before such a complex mutation. Re-emergence due to ancestry or a strange-appearing albinism is the only non-hoax/mistake scenario I can bring myself to believe.
Folks, (not only you, Nismar), this is an extraordinary claim needing extraordinary evidence. We have next to no sound, well-defined evidence all. We don't know what the parents looked like either now or at birth, what the child looked (looks) like, or the full circumstances. We don't know about the circumstances of the conception and birth, not the ancestry. We don't know about the attitudes of the people passing on the information. We do know something about genetics and probability.
The idea of say, a convincingly blonde, "Caucasian" child being the biological child of equally convincing "non-Caucasian" parents is ridiculous to me. I come from a country (one of many, but my point is that I have plenty of first-hand observation to go on) in which products of outbreeding are numerous and varied and in which decades of class-consciousness once led people to be (tragically) observant about the resultant phenotypic characteristics of cross-breeding. The general impression that the report suggests, of a Scandinavian-type child from say the likes of the Williams sisters, just is not going to happen. (NB. There is nothing pejorative in what I am saying! Those sisters may not be Barbie dolls, but they are fine figures of women. I am discussing visual evidence, not superiority!)
Bottom line? Never mind the original sources, not even if we have a queue of bishops lining up to swear to all sorts of things, till someone produces properly controlled 1) visual evidence, who looks like what, etc.
2) Laboratory evidence, who has what biological parental relationship to whom,
till then I say, we have exhausted the cogent aspects of the evidence at hand. And the wilder speculations. dealing with multiple gene loci, scientifically speaking, are of the order of close encounters of the nth kind.
Till anyone tells me something more compelling anyway!
Just bear in mind: I have lived through the Geller, Velikovsky, von Daeniken years too!
Cheers,
Jon
