I was looking at yahoo answers and a lot of the answers as to why hair color is the way it is was just that it was genetic. But that doesn’t really answer anything. While i can recognize that maybe black hair was our original hair color, seeing as it is most common, and pervading in Asian and African peoples. What i want to know is what caused the change in hair color. OK one can say it is genetic, but what environmental alteration led to the genetic change. in other words what caused the other hair colors, was it climate, diet, amount of sunlight hitting the head…?
I suspect ghost stories, personally. 
I know what causes white hair - teenagers.
The genetic component in hair color has to do with sunlight factors. In areas with less sunlight, both hair and skin color grew lighter, while the opposite is true in areas with more sunlight.
Environmental factors don’t really have anything to do with changing and evolving traits.
What probably happened was at some point a child was born with a mutated gene that gave them a different hair color lets say blonde.
Then lets assume the culture into which that child was born happened to find blonde hair attractive, then the blonde gene would spread through the next generations.
Truth is hair color probably just happened randomly and no one launched crusades to eliminate specific hair colors so they kept reproducing.
People looking at blonde hair and finding it attractive doesn’t have anything to do with the “blonde gene” spreading. I would say that jonquil is correct in this instance.
Specific diseases (retroviruses) cause mutation in genes. Today, very few of them are natural but I imagine that long ago, there were a few around. Today they are used in social engineering (AIDS as an example).
Everything must have a cause, something can’t mutate without a cause. Plus according to science Humans have not always existed, as such any genetic factor is still the result of the environment that initialy created us. and you surely can’t say that environment doesn’t alter genetics considering that we definitively see genetic alterations when introduced to things like radiation. The gene’s are not entirely un affected by their exteriors, and those exteriors aren’t un affected by their exteriors and so on…“Then lets assume the culture into which that child was born happened to find blonde hair attractive, then the blonde gene would spread through the next generations.” and that is a contradiction, that suggests that social environment has an impact on genetic propogation…
By any chance could you direct me to a source to stufy regarding more than just that it was studyed but how they studyed this and found out.
This is where most people consider evolution and natural selection with the wrong idea.
The change itself is not the result of the environment, but rather a random mutation.
The hair color itself was just a gene mutated by radiation or disease or just having messed up development.
Nothing caused the trait, it just happened.
Where the environment comes in, is deciding if that mutant will survive and reproduce.
If it doesn’t hind the mutant, chances are the mutation will be passed on simply because the mutant is as likely to survive as any other. No environmental advantage or disadvantage, just different.
If however having lighter hair would result in being killed in the environment, it would not continue to spread.
Mutations survive not because they do better in an environment but because they don’t do worse.
Unless they offer some obvious huge advantage like a giraffe’s neck, but hair color is far less useful than something like that.
but how does any change occur without a cause?
You also didn’t seem to recognize the fact that:
As we “humanity” began and were a product originally of the environment then it was definitive that all our genetic structure and occurrences are thus a result of the environment.
Or one could put it like this, our genes are made up by atoms, as such they are, because atoms are, affected by their environment.
We say “mutated”, or random, because we don’t currently have the capability to understand all the things that impact the genes such as to make any good deductions…
Y’all are both right and wrong. Actually, what happened was this: two genes evolved in proto-man, the rgain and the clril. The rgain, sometimes cited as r-gain, had to do with hair growth. This gene shouldn’t be confused with the gene that causes hypertrichosis, although it’s very similar in that it sometimes causes hair growth in unexpected and unwanted parts of the body once proto-man left Africa and no longer needed hair to protect his/her skin from the sun. The gene has now become so recessive, it’s very uncommon in modern man.
The clril gene, or cl-ril gene, determines hair color. Anthropology recognized that hair, skin and eye color has to do with the amount of melanin within the body. Melanin protects the body from the harmful u-v rays of the sun, so the more sun exposure on gets, the darker his/her body becomes. Since modern man originated as proto-man who evolved in Africa and then spread, the Africans who didn’t leave, maintained the melanin levels that kept their skin, eyes and hair dark as protection from the sun. The farther north proto-man trekked from Africa, the less melanin s/he needed. Their hair, skin and eye color lightened and they lost most of their body hair. By then, of course, the r-gain and the cl-ril genes had pretty much died out of the gene pool–but not quite. Thanks to human genome mapping enough of the genes were discovered for the Knights of Science to come to the rescue–much to the chagrin of philosophers who had been mulling over the ‘problem’ for generations. (How could Genghis Khan have had red hair and blue eyes? Is there Truth in the question, “Doncha make my brown eyes blue?” and all other important ontological questions pondered by philosophical thinkers.)
The knights of science took the almost died-out r-gain and cl-ril genes and created two major products–Rogaine and Clairol! Science also gave us tanning beds, spray-on tans, and colored contact lenses. Now every one can be whatever color they want to be, they can change their hair color when they want, they can regrow the hair they’ve lost–they can even change their eye color!
I don’t do satire very well, do I? I just can’t come up with a good ‘kicker’ line–a ‘yada dada ding, boom, ssss’ line. I’m working on it.
The Sunlight explanations don’t seem to ring quite true for me.
The change has a cause, mutation through disease, radiation or deficient development.
We are not completely the way we are because of environment, if we were we would be far better suited for it.
If we had 4 nostrils we could breath air twice as fast which would greatly help with humans being the best long distance runners. But we don’t.
Why? not because the environment never required it but because the mutation just never came along.
If you believe every change is a result of the environment tell me how people that are born blind through a genetic defect are better suited than others.
Or any other manner of defective genes help people in their environment.
The sun could definitely be what helped the gene spread (less melanin means more Vitamin D in less sun light which increases the chance of survival in less light) but the change itself was the result of a random mutation that just happened to help.
Khrone,
I can agree with what I think you have been saying, but I have to question exactly how you are defining “environment”.
To me, I think it means more than what you mean by it (surmising from your posts).
I view environment as resources, other near by organisms etc.
Anything that could cause an individual to live or die.
Like plants, animals, weather, elevation and so on.
All of which are or are caused by the environment…
Well we do impact our environment so our own effects come back onto us. “As for being far better suited for it” that would entirely depend on how long we have been around to evolve. And I don’t know that having 4 nostrals would help a whole lot especially considering we can just open or mouths, and there may be other reasons your not taking into account.
They wouldn’t be better suited, un ortunately the evironment sometimes effects things such as to harm them. You might say that the tendancy we have to alter such as to situate in an environment is largely due to the luck of the compounding of things that lead to our existence such as to be that way in the first place.
Maybe but not in the way I classify environment. To me all of those are accidental interferences except disease.
What? I have no clue what you said here.
accidental isn’t exactly the case if there was a cause, but I figured you were defining “environment” differently. But I would say that everything is a part of our environment in that it would seem to be affecting all things.
Ok that is understandable let me see if I can re-word it…
They wouldn’t be better suited, unfortunately the environment sometimes effects things such as to harm things (example mediorite hitting earth). You might say that our tendancy to change ourselves in order to fit into our environment is largely due to the way the environment (or accumulation of events) came together to create us in the first place.
That makes more sense and seems logical.
I however still think that things like hair color just happened randomly and weren’t removed because they didn’t really change much.
But you are entitled to your own opinion.