Crap Scottish weather favours ginger hair A genetics research student has suggested that the comparatively high number of ginger-haired people among the Scots and Irish may be due in part to crap weather. While 1-2 per cent of the European population are ginger, this is around eight per cent in Scotland and Ireland. One reason, speculates Emily Pritchard, is that …
...points to the lack of sun, and the negative effects of sunlight, the persistance of blonde and red haired genes also points to positive selection for increased vitamin D production in low light environments.
Although in the USA we get vitamin D through drinking milk, i continue to prefer 211.
Wow, that fiery red-headed temper got the better of you did it?
Have you never heard or told a blonde joke? Never laughed at someone being shorter or taller than average?
I'm I could write an essay pointing out the socio economical differences between racism and people occasionally laughing at your hair -- but I'll leave that as an exercise for someone else.
If you actually read the article you've just cited, you'll see that while there was *a* ginger gene in Europe back then, this was not *the* ginger gene -- it was a different gene.
Of course, if red hair evolved twice in Europe and fair hair once, that suggests that light pigmentation is more than merely "acceptable", but of a real evolutionary advantage -- and that would most likely be vitamin D production, as others have said.
How does that work then? If the Celts didn't migrate into what is now Britain until approximately 400 years before the Romans arrived ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts & http://www.xtimeline.com/timeline/Celtic-Migration ), exactly how did the Scottish (crap) weather put any sort of selective pressure on genes that were still resident in Central Europe some 40,000 years earlier?
Perhaps your grasp of evolutionary time and the mechanisms of natural selection were obtained down on the banks of the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River :-)
There's a growing body of evidence that "migrations" were never wholesale replacements of the local population. There was usually a replacement of the elites (and thus culture, language and technology) but the bulk of the people remained in place as serfs or slaves.
This especially applies to the nomadic warrior cultures, which garnered slaves faster than static cultures and attracted mercenaries through war booty.
I think it's more likely that the rest of the world has a more strict stance against the souless/ day walkers.
Apparently the viking used to stone/burn ginger babies. Possibly this was a world wide practice.
Maybe us scots and irish were just too sensitive and let the little devils' spawns live ?
Not sure where she get's her numbers for the prevalence of red-hair in Ireland in Scotland - I seem to recall reading that the rate is pretty similar all over Northern Europe, and in my experience, you'll see more read-heads in Munich than in Dublin (though there are those who would suggest that that's because there are more Saxons than Celts in Dublin, but that's another argument altogether!).
Why oh why must people call redheads "ginger". The ginger I use in stir fries and lemon tea doesn't look anything like the hair colour of Julianne Moore, Clara Bow, Gillian Anderson, Molly Ringwald, Nicole Kidman, Evan Rachel Wood or my girlfriend.
Let's say "redhead" or "red hair" ... let's do.
It's obvious it's a cultural thing that made the red hair gene so expressive in Scotland.
Even African people get the occasional red hair person but if it's not cultural attractive then that person will not get to pass their genes down to the next generation.
I suggest in Scotland that the clan tribes we have, made red hair people look more attractive in some manner that enabled them to reproduce. Simple.
Nothing to do with the Weather.
People with darker skins are more likely to suffer Vitamin D deficiency syndromes in places with abysmal winter light intensities. Gingers are more likely to suffer sunburn and skin cancer given excessive sun exposure in hotter climes. Nowadays darker skinned people can take winter supplements and fair skinned people can easily use suncream and hats, so its easier for people to live where a few hundred years ago they would have been genetically unsuited.
Celtic is almost identical to Hebrew?Phoenecian in spoken form, and there are some parts of the middle east which have ginger haired people. (Note Hebrew as an ancient language, rather than Jewish, because it is likely the migration of these people predated Judaism)
PHOENICIAN OF PLAUTUS:
Byth lym mo thym nociothii nel ech an ti daisc machon
Ys i do iebrim thyfe lyth chy lya chon temlyph ula.
EARLY IRISH-CELTIC:
Beth liom' mo thime nociaithe, niel ach an ti dairie mae coinne
Is i de leabhraim tafach leith, chi lis con teampluibh ulla.
Have you seen the Ploenulus yourself? The text you quote is quite different from the version on Google Books:
" Byth ilymmoth ynnocho thuulech antidamaschon
Ys sidobrim thyfel yth chyl ischon them liful "
What is the provenance of the version you quote, and are you aware how the purported meaning of the Phoenician fits into the context of the surrounding Latin?
Or are you merely parroting a largely discredited 18th century fetish that many nations had for the idea of being "the lost tribe of Israel"?
"...long after humanity had exited Africa in search of less sunny climes..."
If "humanity" exited Africa, what does that make those who stayed in Africa? The Supreme Court called, they want their ignorance back.
*Note the joke icon - Not accusing racism just surprised somebody else hasn't already pointed it out already!
Since red hair is mostly a recessive trait, it is likely that your spouse has dominant genes for hair color, which prevents your kids from showing their hidden genetic heritage from your side of the family.
It may also be that your daughters have the genes for red beards, but are just not growing them.
Next generation could be different.
I have 2 redhead brothers (at least they were born that way - now the color has faded a bit).
One of these married a redhead and has consistently been producing redheaded offspring (though the variation in actual color of the kids hair is quite large).
Oddly enough blonde is recessive to red as I recall, even tho you tend to see far more blondes than red heads. It;s the same with eye colour - blue is recessive to green but you hardly ever see people with green eyes.
The vit D argument is a pretty strong one though - skin colour would be a selection factor, with fair being more likely to survive and pass on the genes than dark. Given that red is dominant to blonde you'll see a lot of red heads carrying blonde genes.
Given the new research apparantly showing vit D is necessary to "prime" T cells to fight infection I can accept the argument - makes sense if nothing else.
Many thanks, AC. Though this raises two other questions:
What about ginger women? I cannot recall having seen a ginger bearded women (perhaps I didn't realise it was a woman) so maybe male gingers can't be bothered to shave, i.e. have a lazy gene...
And can mother nature be perverse?
My hair is mousy brown and quite easy to cut, but my beard is dark red and really wiry. It'd be easier to simply hammer it through the cheeks and chew it off on the inside than shaving it off (it eats shavers at a frightening pace), so I let it grow and trim it with the hedge cutters occasionally. Besides, it provides quite a bit of facial armour and is nice and warm in the winter, so no harm done. And dogs love it - or maybe that's just the taste of the last five meals hanging around, can't really tell.
Is this a newspaper dumbing down science, or a "researcher" from the Department of the Bleedin' Obvious? I recall my secondary school textbook discussed the role of melanin in protecting against sunburn and skin cancer, and also mentioned a re-occurrence of rickets in northern parts of Britain among the children of African and Asian immigrants. The theory is obvious, what would be interesting, and real science, would be an experiment or study designed to test the theory.
Maybe I've got a chance of getting a research grant for my ground-breaking theory that the average height of people in Hong Kong is lower than in London because of the evolutionary advantage of not being repeatedly whacked about the head by low-hanging street signs?
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