Redheads aren’t going extinct. Here’s why.
Be it ginger, auburn, or strawberry blond, red hair is here to stay, say geneticists.
On the screen and on the street, strawberry blonds and those with auburn tresses attract attention, and always have. That is, in part, because red hair is an exotic trait, occurring in just one or two out of every 100 people. While the gene variants that endow flaming locks are rare, redheads are not destined to vanish from the population, despite recurring claims to that effect.
“Redheads are not going extinct,” says Katerina Zorina-Lichtenwalter, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at University of Colorado, Boulder.
To understand why this is so, it’s necessary first to understand why there are redheads in the first place. As it turns out, it’s not only tabloids that are interested in flame-haired people. Scientists
