From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Oct 03 2002 - 02:04:31 MDT
On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 04:51:22PM -0700, Charles Hixson wrote:
>
> OK. But since blonde is a recessive characteristic, I expect those
> manifesting the characteristic to become increasingly rare (unless you can
> demonstrate some positive selection pressure? Perhaps "Gentlemen prefer
> blonds?")
Yes and no. As isolated populations of homozygotes for the blond allele
interbreed with mixed populations, the number of blonds will initially
fall as the allele is masked by dominant alleles. But eventually a steady
state will be reached, where the allele occurs in a proportion p of the
population, and p^2 will be blonde. I don't have seen any good estimate
of p, but a quick look at random people images on Google gave me the
impression that around 1/8 or less are blonde today. That would imply a
prevalence of the gene of 0.35 in the (mostly American) population.
According to my copy of Cavalli-Sforza's book about human population
genetics there is also a slight tendency for people to mate with people
of similar hair color, but the correlation is just 0.24.
But honestly, who cares? We can always fix it.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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