Thursday, May 1, 2008

Redhead Extinction

Last night during work I was told, by a patient, that by the year 2020 all redheads will be extinct. This person stated that she had read about it in some research paper, and was convinced that it was true. I got a good laugh out of it. I reminded everyone at work that I'm an endangered species.

This evening I decided to do a little research and I found out that SOME researchers believe that by 2100 redheads will be either extremely rare or completely gone.

However in my searching I found "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."

Anyways redheads are amazing, I need to make lots of little babies to help make sure redheads don't go extinct. I don't see how it could happen, because people without red hair carry the gene and pass it on to their offspring. It's a
recessive trait, so it takes both parents passing on the same gene to produce a redheaded child. I'm a redhead, neither of my parents have red hair. I have 2 other sisters with red hair also. I think it's a good chance that if I marry a red head or a man with the gene I will also have red headed children.




2 comments:

S'mee said...

The prettiest girl in high school (according to Thor) was a red head, and yeah, she deserved the title.

Go redheads!

Anonymous said...

Still having a hard time loging on, this is ebster.

I don't think the redhead gene is going anywhere.If it's reciesive it will still be in the genome, possibly to resurfice later down the family tree when an individual carrying the gene mates with another individual carrying the gene.
I could see it getting more rare, but it will only go extict completely if the gene goes extinct, which it probalby won't as long as people carrying the readhead gene continue to be prolific.