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.