« Three Cups of Tea | Main | RegExp Constructor Issue »

Extinction

The March issue of Details had a couple of tidbits I thought were worth mentioning:

4 percent of the world's population carry the gene for red hair. 2100 is the year natural redheads may become extinct, according to the Oxford Hair Foundation.

I knew redheads weren't that common but I didn't know is was that uncommon. While the extinction piece is an odd prediction, the fact that a group of people is tracking and speculating on it is the more intriguing part to me.

Tags: life

Posted by Daniel Rinehart on February 24, 2007 11:21 PM |

Comments

That's an interesting number. If a recessive trait in 4% of the population disappears within 100 years, we should have a lot fewer genetic disorders than we do. Which probably means the OHF knows some stuff I don't, and I should look into it!

Posted by: Brian | February 25, 2007 9:54 AM

This story is completely bogus. It gets picked up every few months by some gullible journalist (or should I say "journalist"), who credulously "reports" the content of an Oxford Hair Foundation press release (often almost verbatim). I did the research and found examples of this "study" -- always passed off as a "new" finding -- in media reports from January 2007, November 2006, March 2006, May 2005, August 2004, March 2004 and November 2003. As a USC Journalism graduate, I'm ashamed and somewhat stunned at how easy it is to fool gullible reporters. Don't these people have Google?

Posted by: Brendan Loy | July 2, 2007 12:54 AM