Posted on 05/24/2005 2:21:35 PM PDT by pissant
She was just walking down the street with her sister, in her old neighborhood, when an elderly woman stopped her car in front of her and called out, "I love your hair! It's so beautiful!"
Caitlin Tydings was about 8 then, and caught off guard. Now a high-school senior, she has since grown accustomed to strangers commenting on her strawberry-blond locks.
If predictions by the Oxford Hair Foundation come to pass, the number of natural redheads everywhere will continue to dwindle until there are none left by the year 2100.
The reason, according to scientists at the independent institute in England, which studies all sorts of hair problems, is that just 4 percent of the world's population carries the red-hair gene. The gene is recessive and therefore diluted when carriers produce children with people who have the dominant brown-hair gene.
Dr. John Gray's explanation of his foundation's findings: "The way things are going, red hair will either be extremely rare or extinct by the end of the century."
Red hair certainly has made the endangered list. But with 4 percent of 6.4 billion people carrying the gene, says University of Rochester Medical Center's David Pearce, it is too large a figure to be wiped out completely in the next 95 years.
"I think someone may want to check their calculator," he says. The red-hair gene "will dilute out and become rare, but there are a variety of other factors that can change hair color that are not really understood well right now."
The gene responsible for red hair was only discovered in the late 1990s. People have a good chance of being born with red hair if they have a mutation of that gene.
Red hair is found in all ethnic backgrounds but is most commonly
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
I have a son and daughter that are both redheads. We are good for at least one more generation.
(you can see my son on my profile page)
Huh. My hair is mostly auburn (the rest is silver). So I'm a mutant, am I?
Former redhead PING
I suppose we'd better get them on the Endangered Species list right away.
My son is a readhead.
lamepostlamepostlamepostlamepost . . .
Very cute!
The hot redhead pictures?
I think a hot redhead is proof of Gods existence.
Neither one of this redhead's children have red hair. My brunette wife dominated in that regard.
Redheads are like pileups on the side of the road, everyone just stops and stares :) I should know, one of my best friends was a redhead chick for many years until i got sick of her attitude.
Well, I was never a natural redhead, but I did enjoy coloring it that way for 2 years. I am a blonde, but I do get natural red highlights in the winter. Summertime it is very blonde. My doggie is a redhead....well red body anyway.
We have moved five times, in two different states, and we still have the same red-headed milk man delivering the milk as I go to work. Must be a very large dairy with loyal delivery men. I remember him cause he sure looks like my two youngest boys.
And here I thought this was a duck thread.........
This is genetic nonsense. If you have one recessive and one dominant gene, half your kids get the recessive gene and half the dominant gene.The proportion of recessive genes in the population is not changed.
I think they call it "flaxen", or something.
("Mut" comes to mind.)
I've always felt pretty lucky to be redhead. Since everyone in my immediate family was either a blond or a redhead, I never felt unusual despite the teasing I got in school. I had one cousin with brown hair and she was the odd one to me.
And now with fake tanning products, I can have the best of both worlds!
Thanks.
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