As long as I'm Posty McPosterson...

[moominmuppet]

A 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.

Comments

[ajollypyruvate]

Utter nonsense. Hair colour is an analog trait, not a digital one. People with dark hair may very well carry the recessive (and thus pass it on to their offspring) and mutations do, after all, occur.

And...

[ajollypyruvate]

Snopes to the rescue, again.

Evolution does not work like that.

[grendelkhan.livejournal.com]

Recessive alleles which are not deleterious are not going to fall out of the gene pool. If the recessive trait doesn't negatively affect fitness, the whole thing settles into a Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. The trait isn't going to "die out". Sheesh. Lurk population genetics moar, media people.

[compostwormbin.livejournal.com]

Nooo! I have always adored red hair, and redheads. My husband, for instance. We'd have a good shot at redhead kids because I am also fair with a redhead grandma on my dad's side. But kids haven't been in the plan, so who knows.