Ryan Bridge: Congratulations to the redheads

A special good morning to all the redheads listening. 

There's some new Harvard research that's come out about human evolution and it mentions you. I'll get to you in a sec.

Conventional wisdom says that homo sapiens (us) basically stopped evolving when we emerged 300,000 years ago. We reached peak human.

It took us about seven million years to evolve from looking more like Apes. It took us four million years to walk on two legs, which is one of things that makes humans. More recently we learnt how to use tools, language. 

But once we stopped hunter-gathering, roaming round looking for food, and settled down to farm our own and build cities and civilisations, natural selection wasn't such a big deal. 

But that's not true. 

They looked at DNA from 16,000 people over 10,000 years, some from ancient burial sites and modern ones from the UK Biobank.

We used to think natural selection was changing just a dozen genes, they now reckon it's hundreds. 

Coeliac disease is now more common. You might think why? Who doesn't love pasta and oats? You'd think evolution would edit out coeliac diseases. 

No, because the gene actually increases your resistance to a bunch of germs and bacteria. So, you're less likely to die, more likely to live longer. The longer you live, the more likely you pass that gene onto your kids. That's how natural selection works.

The gene for narrow waists have become more common because we didn't need to store as much fat post-hunter-gatherer days (though you wouldn't know it walking through the supermarket).

And redheads, the red hair gene, MC1R, it's become more common in recent history. 

It's popular. More gingers than ever before. Congratulations.

The only mystery is why as there's no obvious survival advantage, other than looking fabulous, I suppose.

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