Yes, red hair is a recessive treat, BUT, it like most things involving the expression of genetic treats it is NOT that simple. Hair color, along with eye color and a myriad of other human/mammalian treats is presented as a simple “2 gene” genetic model. It’s not! It’s actually more involved than that. It entails pigment receptors, incomplete dominance relating to allele variants, and probably other genes on different chromosomes. The juries still out on how all the mechanics works in the first place!

While it maybe true that only 2-4% of the total human population carries the requisite recessive gene(s), if you split the difference, 3% means that nearly 200,000,000 people are carriers. ALSO the 2-4% is a population average as a whole. It doesn’t apply to those of Celtic (and to a lesser extent) Teutonic descent. In Scotland 13% of the population has red hair and approx. 45% carries the gene(s). Ireland ranks 2nd with about 10% of the population redheads and 35% carriers. And the “Vikings” Norsemen have been known to have a ginger head/beard or 2.

I personally think my niece is much more like to be the future of redheads. My golden blond, battleship gray eyed 3/4 Celtic, 1/4 German sister, and my African/American brother-in-law produced a creamy cafe au lait skinned, light amber eyed little girl with a head of long, thick, wavy, rich auburn hair. I know I’m biased, but I have watched, from a distanced, how strangers respond to her. Almost every person that sees her does a double take and them smiles. People will go out of their way to tell her or who ever is with her, how absolutely striking she is.

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?

kk

But Susan, their rarity makes them all the more valuable! ;]

kk