And red hair blends with other hair color genes. LW says he's ginger but "ginger" covers a wide range of shades -- I had a good friend as a kid whose mother had nearly black hair, and her father had BRIGHT GINGER hair, and she had the darkest, reddest hair I've ever seen on a human person. Still ginger! And those genes are different, so you can have the MC1R mutation and dark hair and end up dark red, or light hair and be a brighter red, and how many copies of a mutated MC1R you have also matters....and so a ginger person having a child with dark hair isn't at all out of the realm of possibility. it's not even out of the realm of "likely", esp. given that the child's mother is neither blond nor ginger herself.