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Evolution doesn't produce perfect adaptations, just "good enough".
Humans lost their body hair and got more on their head when they developed walking upright in Africa.
Lets sweat cool the body down and protects the head from the sun.
At some point, something lead to a mutation that turned curly hair into straight hair, and that seems to have been selected for in populations living in colder climates.
But that doesn't mean it increased chances of survival. Maybe it was just preferred by sexual partners for some reason, which may even have been cultural at that point.
Perhaps the hair change was the result of some other gene expression that was beneficial while the hair change itself was neutral-ish.
This reminds me of something I've been wondering about for a while now - burning hair has a distinct and very strong smell. That makes sense - if your hair is on fire, you want to know ASAP. My question is whether our hair evolved to have something in it that produces this smell, or if we just evolved to be particularly receptive to the smell of burning keratin.
That is of course ignoring the boring answers: "A little bit of both" and "It just worked out like that randomly", as well as the best answer "Wait, that's what that smell is?! Oh shit, you're right, I'm burning! AAAAAAAA!!!!"
You had it: people whose hair didn't smell when burning probably died more often, skewing the chances of survival towards smelly-when-on-fire hair.
Not what I was wondering about, but thanks.
How often were people catching on fire and not noticing that this would cause any kind of selection criteria?
Does the subject's awareness of the selection matter?
The premise here was that they noticed in time to not die... So, yes?
Ah I misread it.
I reckon it's not so much about noticing in absolute terms (to notice vs not to notice), but rather about the smallest difference that smelly hair would make. Amplify that over millions of years and smelly hair has a good chance of being everywhere eventually.
I dunno. I'm just having trouble conceptualizing any kind of scenario that could happen with enough frequency to cause this trait to be selected for.
I think it's more likely that the chemicals in hair just happen to smell bad when burnt. Those chemicals may have been filtered for other reasons.
Yea that could also very well be, that it was pre-existing and had no impact during evolution. I could see there being an evolutionary advantage to hair smelling bad. That's as far as my confidence and knowledge reaches on the matter. Very interesting nonetheless! :)
It feels cool to have curly hair despite being from a long line of cold climaters.
Way I figure, the common traits for any given part of the world where as much influenced by the isolation of groups as environmental factors. Back in primitive times it could take months wandering before you happened across another group, and even then there may be 'untrusted tribe' type conflicts.
It still shows up today in how rural isolated communities tend to foster more prejudiced attitudes towards people different from them. But now we can move all over quickly and communicate instantly, so there's a less concentrated effect by location. Plus the whole advent of ordered society and the host of factors that brings into play.