As long as I'm Posty McPosterson...
Aug. 31st, 2007 03:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moominmuppetA friend emailed me the following link:
Redheads set for extinction
From: The Courier-Mail
August 22, 2007
PETER Beattie, Nicole Kidman and Michael Voss are. So were William Shakespeare, Christopher Columbus and Queen Elizabeth the First.
But the future doesn't look bright for people with ginger hair.
According to genetic scientists redheads are becoming rarer and could be extinct in 100 years.
Click here to read the full article on the website
And I wrote the following reply (I should note that I think the "100 year" estimate is probably substantially off, but the overall effect is certainly happening):
I have such weirdly mixed feelings about it (the same is apparently happening to true blondes). I've actually been thinking about the idea since I was a pre-teen, when I read some relatively lousy Piers Anthony young adult SF, where the entire population of the world had homogenized in terms of skin and hair tone, except these last few kids, who were being herded into breeding only with those who had the same traits, so they could be 'preserved'. Of course, people fell in love across the boundaries, and adventure was had.
But it did make me think a lot. It made me realize that something could seem both tragic, and wrong to prevent at the same time. I love all the unique weirdnesses that biological isolation has caused, and I value them, but I don't know if I see any true benefit to trying too hard to maintain them, and I definitely see downsides to doing so. Of couse, this isn't all that different from all the questions about how we handle the same issues culturally, and I have a much harder time answering that one.
On the positive side, one of the few easy bonuses of the types of genetic tinkering we may be able to do in the relatively near future is that it wouldn't be all that hard to artificially maintain those traits if we choose to, without playing "breeding program" games, and I'm sure some people would.
Redheads set for extinction
From: The Courier-Mail
August 22, 2007
PETER Beattie, Nicole Kidman and Michael Voss are. So were William Shakespeare, Christopher Columbus and Queen Elizabeth the First.
But the future doesn't look bright for people with ginger hair.
According to genetic scientists redheads are becoming rarer and could be extinct in 100 years.
Click here to read the full article on the website
And I wrote the following reply (I should note that I think the "100 year" estimate is probably substantially off, but the overall effect is certainly happening):
I have such weirdly mixed feelings about it (the same is apparently happening to true blondes). I've actually been thinking about the idea since I was a pre-teen, when I read some relatively lousy Piers Anthony young adult SF, where the entire population of the world had homogenized in terms of skin and hair tone, except these last few kids, who were being herded into breeding only with those who had the same traits, so they could be 'preserved'. Of course, people fell in love across the boundaries, and adventure was had.
But it did make me think a lot. It made me realize that something could seem both tragic, and wrong to prevent at the same time. I love all the unique weirdnesses that biological isolation has caused, and I value them, but I don't know if I see any true benefit to trying too hard to maintain them, and I definitely see downsides to doing so. Of couse, this isn't all that different from all the questions about how we handle the same issues culturally, and I have a much harder time answering that one.
On the positive side, one of the few easy bonuses of the types of genetic tinkering we may be able to do in the relatively near future is that it wouldn't be all that hard to artificially maintain those traits if we choose to, without playing "breeding program" games, and I'm sure some people would.
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Re: And...
Date: 2007-08-31 11:07 pm (UTC)Sadly, however, most often these discussions happen in white supremacist frameworks, where the argument is "this is a bad thing that must be prevented and we must preserve our purity" and all that crap. The blond article in Snopes certainly seems to be obliqely referencing those attitudes. I think all this mixing things up is fundamentally a good thing for us, but it doesn't change that I also find the loss of some of those unique extremes to simultaneously be sad.
Purity of the race, ptui!
Date: 2007-08-31 11:48 pm (UTC)Re: Purity of the race, ptui!
Date: 2007-09-01 02:47 am (UTC)