Blonds get last laugh after media's gaffe
Posted on 10/02/2002 4:06:17 AM PDT by MeekOneGOP
Blonds get last laugh after media's gaffe
Erroneous reports cited study predicting extinction of towheads
10/02/2002
Apparently it fell into the category "too good to check."
On Friday, several British newspapers reported that the World Health Organization had found in a study that blonds would become extinct within 200 years, because blondness was caused by a recessive gene that was dying out. The reports were repeated Friday by anchors for the ABC News program Good Morning America and on Saturday by CNN.
There was only one problem, the health organization said in a prepared statement Tuesday: It had never reported that blonds would become extinct, and it had never done a study on the subject.
"WHO has no knowledge of how these news reports originated," the organization, a Geneva-based agency of the United Nations, announced, "but would like to stress that we have no opinion of the future existence of blonds."
All the news reports in Britain and the United States cited a study from the World Health Organization - "a blonde-shell study," as The Daily Star of London put it. But none reported any scientific details from the study or the names of the scientists involved.
On Good Morning America, Charles Gibson began a conversation with his co-anchor, Diane Sawyer, by saying: "There's a study from the World Health Organization, this is for real, that blonds are an endangered species. Women and men with blond hair, eyebrows and blue eyes, natural blonds, they say will vanish from the face of the Earth within 200 years, because it is not as strong a gene as brunets'."
Jeffrey Schneider, a spokesman for ABC News, said the anchors got the information from an ABC producer in London who said he had read it in a British newspaper.
Journalists in London said the source of the reports was probably one of several news agencies used by the British press, but it remained unclear which one.
If the group that carries blonde genes is not reproducing at replacement levels, how is it that the gene will not die out?
Granted, there are small populations of Caucasians who are having more than 2 children, but these groups, usually evangelical Christians, are small in number. However, other ethnic groups that do not carry blonde genes are reproducing in large numbers and doing well.
I have monitored several of these threads and seen a lot of joking and some short-tempered chastisement of those of us who "cannot pass freshmen biology." What I haven't seen is an honest analysis and description of how population genetics work, in a way that demonstrates this purported phenomenon is bogus. Please help us to understand how this allele will not die out.
So where did the first blonde come from? (there is a joke in that somewhere, but I ain't touching that one)
No worries, mate: then I will:
Two blondes walk into a bar. They tell the bartender, "Champagne! We're celebrating!"
Bartender: "Celebrating? What?"
Blondes: "Well, we just finished a puzzle in record speed!"
Bartender: "Really? How?"
Blondes: "Well, the box said 2-4 years, but we did it in six months!"
Blondes are on their way to extinction..
A new study by German researchers claims that people with blonde hair comprise an endangered species that will become extinct by 2202.
The problem is that blonde hair -- like blue eyes -- is caused by a recessive gene. In order for a child to have blonde hair, it must have the gene for blond hair on both sides of the family in the grandparents' generation.
The decline and fall of the blonde is most likely being caused by bottle blondes who, researchers believe, are more attractive to men than true blondes.
Razib adds: I know about this story. I don't believe it really, but if it is true, I'll be tearing my hair out in lamentation...let's hope that transhumanism doesn't succeed and I don't see that terrible day....
Godless rolls eyes heavenward:
The authors of this article don't know the first thing about population genetics. Even if blonde hair was a phenotype that only occurred in a homozygous recessive (a big if), it's not a lethal disease. In fact, it may even convey a reproductive advantage, at least in the US. If the selection pressure against blonds was very strong (e.g. lethal), it'd take a long time for blonds to go "extinct", but in the absence of such selection pressure it's highly unlikely that blonds will disappear any time soon.
Note also that if we had random worldwide mating, then we'd eventually attain Hardy-Weinberg equlibrium, in which the frequency of a homozygous recessive selectively neutral trait is constant from generation to generation. In other words, there's a lower limit to how infrequent blonds will be as long as being blond is a neutral or slightly positive trait in terms of reproductive fitness. But we don't have random mating - we have assortative mating. Meaning that like tends to marry like. That's true for height and IQ, and it's true for race. Whites tend to marry whites, which is non-random mating, which tends to boost the frequency of the double recessives if the genes for blond hair are found exclusively in white populations. [1] Bottom line - this article is baloney.
[1] This is something of an oversimplification in the US, as southern and eastern Europeans mingle pretty freely with northern Europeans, but in the main the argument holds.
And your evidence that homosexuality is genetic is what? You pose this question as proof of something?
Congressman Billybob
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Which tells you all you need to know about the "news" media. |
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