Approximately two percent of people worldwide have natural red hair.
Researchers in Scotland now believe that genes in natural born redheads may soon be extinct in the near future, but the reason might be far from your first guess: Climate change.
In the world, about two percent of people have natural red hair, and 13 percent of the population of Scotland factors into this.
Numerous hypotheses have been formulated in the past sharing the suspicion that redhead genes may be disappearing, largely blaming the rarity of the gene, which is often tied to ethnicity. According to the researchers, the red-headed gene is the result of an evolutionary mutation, beneficial for vitamin D absorption in cold weather, which accounts for why it is seen so frequently in Scotland with its notoriously overcast climate. Global warming could change all of that.
'I think the reason for light skin and red hair is that we do not get enough sun and we have to get all the Vitamin D we can,' Dr. Alastair Moffat, managing director of ScotlandsDNA, said in a statement obtained by the Daily Mail.
However, many of the study's peer reviewers have pointed out that Scotland's climate would have to change radically, even if the extinction were to happen over the next hundred years, requiring people with pale skin and red hair to endure harsh living conditions before dying out, an event that seems extremely unlikely despite the rapidity of the onset of climate change.
Lilian Hunt, a PhD student at the National Institute for Medical Research, says that while the findings are accurate, the gradual disappearance of the ginger gene has a more benign cause.
'In reality, the ginger trait is likely to become rarer over time, due to normal genetic drift mixed with expansion of the Scottish gene pool, as with any recessive gene mutation,' Hunt says on the Weather Network's UK site.
0 Yorumlar