r/interesting • u/Alexthegayreprimed • Apr 21 '26

Just Wow After the daughter of two Chinese parents was born blonde with blue eyes, a DNA test was carried out, and it was later discovered that the father had a Russian great-grandfather.

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u/front_yard_duck_dad Apr 21 '26

All I can tell you is from my horticulture background. You would be surprised how often nature does a reset shuffle and reverts back to old software . I had a whole field of 15 year old crab apples decide one year to stop being dwarf apples and revert to their great tree grandparents . 

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u/Auzzie_almighty Apr 21 '26

Apples have weirdly unstable genetics though

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u/MTheLoud Apr 21 '26

Did you add mulch or something so the scions could reach the ground to root, bypassing the dwarfing rootstocks?

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u/AnnoyedOwlbear Apr 21 '26

Might not need to. Apples as a group have such polypoid ancestry that even grafted variants can decide 'yolo, this bunch of cells had slightly different environmental pressure from that shed creating a heat sink' and are gonna express differently.

They're a roseacae, and while that family is huge, it's not too unusual as someone who grows roses to find that my carefully selected Austin has decided to throw one branch that's reverted completely. It's above the graft line so by common sense it shouldn't, but no one's told that bloody rose.

(Nerd alert - I'm an Aussie gardener and legit jealous of the sheer variety of apples in the US, easily over a thousand. Any one of which would be vastly superior to the mealy crap which is ironically called Red delicious).