“The disappearing blonde gene was a hoax claiming a scientific study had estimated that natural blonds would become extinct, repeated as fact in reputable media such as the BBC and *The Sunday Times* between 2002 and 2006.”
“The hoax claimed that, because the allele for the genes for hair colour is recessive, blond hair would become less common as people with dominant non-blond hair alleles had offspring with people with the recessive alleles, even though such a pairing would retain one copy of the blond allele in the genome of the offspring. Claims that blond hair would disappear have been made since 1865.”
I’m trying to understand *why* it’s a hoax *and* how *the reality* works. To a layman and uneducated non-expert on genes, like myself, the premise of the hoax may at least *seem* logical:
If more and more people with the **dominant blond-hair gene** have offspring with people that have a **dominant non-blond gene**, then, eventually, the blond-hair gene may still *exist* but blond-haired people will be a rarity, because the blond-hair gene will be dominated by dominant non-blond genes. I mean, wouldn’t a traditional blond-haired, blue-eyed Swede only be born through two people with the dominant blond-gene?
In: 16
Two parents, both with one brown hair gene (Br) and one blond hair gene (Bl).
They decide to have children, so each of their children inherits ONE hair color gene from each parent, selected at random by the cellular process that produces eggs and sperm.
Some of their children will end up inheriting one Br from each parent and no Bl, some will inherit one Br and one Bl, and some will inherit one Bl from each parent and no Br.
The ones that get at least one Br will have brown hair, but the ones that don’t get any Br and only get Bl will have blonde hair.
So as long as the genes are present, the possibility of them being expressed continues to exist.
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