Preserving human genetic diversity

Should we purposefully preserve red and blond hair, as well as green and blue eye colours?

Studies predict that blond hair will die out as a nautral feature in this centur, for example.

edited 18th Aug '11 10:57:18 AM by Erock

Blond hair dying out? No! That's my personal preference!

Ah well, I'm a failure at romance anyhow, so it's not like it would make a difference...

They say the last blond person willl be born in Finland or Sweden around 2050, IIRC.

edited 18th Aug '11 11:05:39 AM by Erock

Son of a bitch! Countries I would never live in. Dammit. That sucks...

Green eyes and red hair must be protected at all costs. Blue eyes too.

Blonde is not a priority. Let it perish.

Why wouldn't you live in Scandinavia?

Blond hair is the most important thing to preserve!

edited 18th Aug '11 11:11:14 AM by Erock

Don't confuse genotype and phenotype. The genes for blond or red hair won't die out, and here are hence preserved. Just the phenotype might go largely under. But that all won' matter anyway soon. Want blonde hair? Modify your genes! That makes the question rather moot

I'm going to go out on a (fairly sturdy) limb and say that the "studies" mentioned in the OP are bunkum. Heredity is particulate; greater heterogeneity of alleles can result in recessive traits being expressed less frequently, but they will never die out as long as the alleles themselves still exist. And let's not forget about the wonderful world of mutation which produced these traits to begin with. It can happen again.

Blond hair ain't goin' anywhere, in other words.

edited 18th Aug '11 11:15:49 AM by Karalora

Because dammit, I'm an American and I stand against socialist-communist scum on principle, regardless if it comes with amazing healthcare!

Mutations don't happen very often.

Did I mention free university?

edited 18th Aug '11 11:20:15 AM by Erock

Bleh... I'm going to the college with the military, so that doesn't really appeal to me personally...

@Karalora,

Yay!

I'm waiting for the blue hair mutation. GET HERE DAMMIT.

Nonsense. You have some. I have some. Some estimates run as high as 25 new mutations in every individual.

Expressed mutations are rare.

But the fact remains that even if every blond person in the world mated exclusively with homozygous dark-haired people, the blond alleles would still be there and could be expressed in the next generation when they paired up again. Don't you remember your Punnett Squares?

Blue is tricky for mammals. It would probably have to be a vaguely bluish gray. Lavender has better odds. Ever seen a lavender cat? I have. It wasn't like a purple iris or anything, but it didn't take any imagination to go "Whoa, that cat is lavender!"

edited 18th Aug '11 11:25:56 AM by Karalora

I'll guess I learn more in Grade 11 Biology.

And I meant mutations that have a long lasting effect, like the genes for blond hair or blue eyes.

edited 18th Aug '11 11:27:21 AM by Erock

Christ I hated those so much. They were what made me officially decide I would never have a career in biology.

But, yeah, every time there is a new being conceived it has a shitton of mutations, since mutation is just "difference in the genetic code." It happens with the "crossing over" portion of conception, if I recall correctly...

I'd be fine with bluish-grey. That sounds cool...

As for a lavender cat...Oooh. That's neat. I want to see one...

^I loved them because I thought they were easy and tedious.

edited 18th Aug '11 11:27:24 AM by Aondeug

You should probably also stop reading Neo-Nazi websites.

No, I'm not talking about recombination. I'm talking about bona-fide DNA copying errors, nucleotide sequences that don't exist in either parent. We all have some. Very few of us have one that makes a damn bit of phenotypical difference.

edited 18th Aug '11 11:28:19 AM by Karalora

Punnet Squares weren't that bad! I remember in my sophomore year my teacher gave me like 50 points of extra credit for doing one with something around 10 genes or something. It took so long...

Hem.

Yeah, blondes aren't dying out.

edited 18th Aug '11 11:29:00 AM by TheEarthSheep

I don't read Neo-Nazi websites. I hate them with a passion.

I'm just asking, because we've made a big deal of preserving animal diversity.

edited 18th Aug '11 11:30:09 AM by Erock

I never said you could see the mutations, and you're right in that we all have them. Phenotype and genotype was easy in biology, but Punnet squares were fucking evil. The only test I failed in that class was because of those damned things...

The problem is that you would have to start infringing on some basic freedoms to make sure we stayed "diverse." Not cool...

edited 18th Aug '11 11:31:38 AM by USAF713

It's a well-known hoax. To those that believed it: suckers! :D

Still, I'm concerned with red hair and eye colour.

Fair enough. I didn't mean it literally, just that those are the people I usually see "disappearing blond panic" come from. Who else would a) be ignorant enough of human genetics to think it was a reasonable possibility and b) think it was automatically a bad thing?

The same goes for any recessive trait. Just because it is invisible in any one generation doesn't mean the necessary genes have vanished. Red hair, blue eyes, green eyes, inability to taste that one chemical they put on paper and make you see if you can taste in high school to demonstrate dominant vs. recessive genes...it'll all be here for the foreseeable future.

edited 18th Aug '11 11:36:57 AM by Karalora

Well, that's part of my question: is it even a bad thing?

I think it is, personally, but I wa s curious what other people think. Red hair is double recessive, right?

~raises hand~

Future history major here, not biological science...