Piedmont College Navigator

Issue date: 2/19/07 Section: Features

"I can remember going to the grocery store with my mom when I was kid and having people come up to us and say, 'Your son has beautiful hair, you are so lucky,'" says Senior Seth Reese.
That statement may become truer as this century nears its end according to the Oxford Hair Foundation. It is predicting that number of natural redheads in the world will continue to dwindle leaving the world without redheads by the year 2100. The scientists at the Oxford Hair Foundation claim that only four percent of the world's population is naturally redheaded. The decrease of people with naturally red hair in recent years are attributed to the fact that the gene is recessive. This causes the gene to dilute when a carrier produces children with someone who carries the dominant brown-hair gene.
According to the Tucson Citizen, David Pearce from the University of Rochester Medical Center says that the red hair gene "will dilute out and become more rare, but there are a variety of other factors that can change hair color that are not really understood well right now."
Pearce also says four percent of the 6.4 billion people in the world, is too large a number to have the gene extinct in just 95 years.
Geneticist Simone Marticke of Stanford University supports Pearce's ideas. Marticke says that the trait is decreasing because the gene is recessive. This means that you have to have two copies of the gene for the trait to show. Marticke also says that this means that of the four percent that has the gene, the number of people who actually have red hair is even less.
The red hair gene has survived this long because it developed in small pockets according to Marticke. The gene became more diluted because humans have become more mobile and people left the small pockets and new people moved in.
Since people are more mobile, in the future there will be fewer people with the single gene and they will be more spread out making it less likely that they will find each other according to Marticke. Marticke says, "However, for as long as the gene is still circulating, the chance of a red-haired child being born is not zero. So you can expect one turning up every now and then, just very rarely."
The gene that causes red hair is melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R), which is a gene that everyone has. The red-hair version of the MC1R gene has slight mutations that cause red hair. It is possible that one of your copies of the gene can have the mutation and the other not, which would result in your being a carrier of red hair, without having red hair.
"I can remember being really confused when the strangers would come up to us and rave about my hair. I guess because it is just something I always lived with," said Reese. Redheads like Reese can look forward to even more compliments on their hair, as it becomes more and more a rarity as the gene becomes further diluted.

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