#Clover tongue skin
#Clover tongue full

Join 800,000+ Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter. Always consult your own GP if you're in any way concerned about your health. The BBC is not liable for the contents of any external internet sites listed, nor does it endorse any commercial product or service mentioned or advised on any of the sites. The BBC is not responsible or liable for any diagnosis made by a user based on the content of this site. Twitter: content within this column is provided for general information only, and should not be treated as a substitute for the medical advice of your own doctor or any other health care professional. If you have taught yourself to roll your tongue, I’d be interested to hear about it. But maybe other people have succeeded too. When John McDonald, from the University of Delaware’s Department of Biological Sciences, asked 33 non-roller students to practise tongue-rolling each day, after a month one extra person could do it. Instead it might involve multiple genes or variants of genes.Īnd it seems I’m not alone in learning through practice. And after decades of investigation, what do we know? Well, it is likely that there is some genetic element, but not one that is straightforward. It’s not something that most people practice or even discuss, so, when studying it, you can limit the environmental influences affecting it. But its insignificance is precisely the reason it makes an interesting topic for genetic studies. You could argue that tongue-rolling doesn’t matter.

#Clover tongue full

To complicate matters further, some people can’t in fact be classified as rollers or non-rollers because they can curl the sides of their tongue up slightly, without being able to make the full U. Nonetheless he concluded that tongue rolling was conditioned, at least in part, by heredity. From those who were prepared to reveal their tongues, he found four who could roll their tongues despite the fact that none of their parents could. He noted that a few children refused to open their mouths to reveal whether or not they could do it.

#Clover tongue skin

Eye colour, skin tone and the presence of freckles are thought to work in this way (although we now know that these too can be affected by variants of other genes too).

It was the leading geneticist Alfred Sturtevant who suggested back in 1940 that tongue-rolling was a Mendelian trait, meaning that it was inherited not as a blend of your parents’ genes, but from one of your parents. Still, even today, you can find this theory in biology textbooks. The reason I could, is that the simple inheritance notion of tongue-rolling is a myth. This puzzled me, as a genetically-inherited capability is not something you should be able to learn to do. To my surprise, eventually, I could do it. And if you hadn’t, you would never be able to do it.ĭetermined not to beaten at this admittedly pointless skill, I spent idle moments practising. You had either inherited the right variant of the tongue-rolling gene or you hadn’t. The reason we couldn’t all do it, we were told, is because it is a simple genetic trait. I remember sitting on my high stool at the lab bench trying in vain to roll my tongue, while my friends seemed to be able to do it effortlessly. If you tried this before, the chances are it was in a biology lesson on genetics at school. If you can do it you are a tongue-roller, along with between 65 and 81% of people, more of them women than men. Stand in front of a mirror, open your mouth slightly and try to bring the sides of your tongue up towards each other to make a U-shape.