Stigmata ?

[EternalOptimist]

There was a programme on TV last night talking about the evolutionary reasons behind humans loosing their fur. The general idea they attached to was that it was related to cooling. For one thing our large brains require a lot of cooling and we are the best sweaters on the planet. Bare skins helps evaporation. We kept head hair for protection against the sun.

Anyway my point, one left unaddressed by the program, is why do males lose their head hair? Some (or probably most to some degree) males start to lose head hair in their early twenties and this you would think would be noticed by evolution. And why is it mainly males (or should I say manly males )? I gather females do too, but at much later age and in a different way.

I know this bird who is losing her hair, she looks a bit like a man too. Jade something

[MaryPoppins]

Stigmata is a real condition, or so it told me on the zone reality channel last week on SKY.

Time to get back to work me thinks.

I always thought Stigmata would be an excellent reason for calling in sick. (For permies)

[EternalOptimist]

Testosterone.

If you chop your nads off you won't go bald.

You'll get rather fat though.

HTH

how does that work then ?

<fat and bald here>

[EternalOptimist]

Male pattern baldness is caused by testosterone.

Chopping your nads off reduces the testosterone level rather a lot...


Eunuchs tend to get fat.

HTH.

So Hitler then, he would be half bald, half fat.


nah, I'm not much good at bolecular science

[Mich the Tester]

There's this bloke a few desks away from me who keeps looking at me and smirking. I think he may be 'one of those' and since I have recently joined the ancient order of 'The Knights of Sodom' and have adopted the sacred hairdo, next time the little mincer is the bog I'm going to batter him with my Cilice.

You’ve been knighted for sodomy?

[OwlHoot]

There was a programme on TV last night talking about the evolutionary reasons behind humans loosing their fur. The general idea they attached to was that it was related to cooling.

Also I reckon it may have had a lot to do with parasites - For hundreds of thousands of years early humans made a living scavenging dead animals, and as soon as an animal dies all its fleas and lice leave it to find new hosts, i.e. the ape men. So obviously the less body hair they had the less opportunity for the critters to hitch a lift.

[NotAllThere]

Is that why dolphins are hairless? And those little rat-like dogs?

[Spacecadet]

we probably lost our body hair after adapting to using animal skins and fire to keep warm at night.
Less hair means less parasites and it's easier to tell if a fellow human is sick or not when they have less hair to hide the symptoms, so being hairless means more chance of mating so the excessive body hair is slowly bred out of the gene pool.