(no subject)
I thought this was pretty sweet. Shows what an extreme anomaly my red headed posse is. I wonder what the probability was of us actually coming together. Ew, statistics. Oh, if you weren't aware, my 2 bestest friends at school are both redheads. We attract quite a bit of attention, strange looks, etc. I never really thought of it as weird... but from the amount of comments we get about it... it must be. Ha ha, we joke that we only allow redheads to eat with us at dinner. But we do make exceptions, if anyone wants to come visit.
From The Seattle Times
By Robin L. Flanigan
Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle
She was just walking down the street with her sister, in her old
neighborhood, when an elderly woman stopped her car in front of her and
called out, "I love your hair! It's so beautiful!"
Caitlin Tydings was about 8 then, and caught off guard. Now a
high-school senior, she has since grown accustomed to strangers
commenting on her strawberry-blond locks.
If predictions by the Oxford Hair Foundation come to pass, the number
of natural redheads everywhere will continue to dwindle until there are
none left by the year 2100.
The reason, according to scientists at the independent institute in
England, which studies all sorts of hair problems, is that just 4
percent of the world's population carries the red-hair gene. The gene is
recessive and therefore diluted when carriers produce children with
people who have the dominant brown-hair gene.
Dr. John Gray's explanation of his foundation's findings: "The way
things are going, red hair will either be extremely rare or extinct by
the end of the century."
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.
"I think someone may want to check their calculator," he says. The
red-hair gene "will dilute out and become rare, but there are a variety
of other factors that can change hair color that are not really
understood well right now."
The gene responsible for red hair was only discovered in the late
1990s. People have a good chance of being born with red hair if they
have a mutation of that gene.
Red hair is found in all ethnic backgrounds but is most commonly
associated with people of Celtic descent.
Red hair skipped two generations before sprouting on Brianna McBride,
a 5-year-old preschooler from Penfield, N.Y. It comes from her
great-grandmother on her father's side.
"As a baby, we'd be in the store and people would always try to touch
her head. She didn't like that, so she was very shy," recalls her mom,
Alice. As Brianna got older, "we started to point out other redheads,
and she started understanding."
Now, her mom adds, "she looks forward to the attention. She has really
learned how to use it."