Evolution

Today i attended a seminary on phonology, and the speakers were talking about codas, onset, nuclei and a bunch of other stuff that we haven't even begun to look at in our classes yet... So my mind wandered off again.

Why do our skins have so little hair on them, compared to other animals?

My first thought was that this was indicative of our having evolved it in a hot, dry climate such as that in the African savvanah. After all, here in the Arctic you see people wearing a lot of clothes, and if we had pelts growing on us we could save some money and buy a few more beers instead of so many sweaters and jackets and scarfs. Also, if we'd spent an evolutionarily long time in a hot and wet place, we might have evolved something similar to oilcloth (preferably yellow), but that's not the case, either.

Then it occurred to me that most animals in the savannah do have pelts. Lions and jiraffes do, so how to account for this discrepancy? There are a few animals in that general area that have hairless skins, namely naked mole rats and hippos, so perhaps we evolved our hairless skin underground, or while floating our lives away on lakes and swamps? The buckteeth on some people do seem big enough to be a remainder of some earth-churning existence in tunnels... But if so, where are the palmate, thick claws supposed to aid in the digging? As for the lake possibility, i haven't discarded it yet. Maybe that's why i miss so much having a tub in my bathroom.

Later i realized i might have reversed cause and effect. Maybe it's not that we wear clothes because we don't have pelts, but the opposite is true: that is, we lost our pelts because we started to wear clothes. Someone should do the mathematics, but probably it's more expensive for a body to grow a lot of hair than to pay for a tailor.

Seriously though... What this implies is that our loss of hair has nothing to do with climate, but with the fact that wherever we may live, we possess the ability to cover ourselves and function in most weather conditions found on this planet. So maybe our hairlessness is related to our big brains, too (i know, old story).

If this were the case, though, why do we still grow so much hair on our heads? After all, at the gap we may buy not only gloves, but also hats. Perhaps the hair is there as an extra protection, and evolutionary constraints spelled something like: "ok, let them decide how much cleavage they want to show, but their brains are too important to allow them to accidentally fry".

The logical question then is (yes, you guessed): why male pattern baldness, then? You see, if women also got consistently bald, then that might signal that evolution is learning to trust that we will consistently use hats. As they don't, we must consider other possibilities. Does male pattern baldness mean that the brain of men can be freely fried after a certain age? Or that from an evolutionary point of view it doesn't make any sense to give men's brains the additional protection after such an age? After all, once a guy reproduces, the woman can theoretically take care of the children herself. In some cases, say if he is violent, or stubborn, the woman might even do better without him, or with a less brainy version of him. So, if a guy doesn't have enough brains to protect his brains when he goes bald, then he may become stupid enough that the woman can manage him more easily.

If this is the case, then one should expect a correlation between baldness and stupidity. A fertile ground for someone's doctoral thesis, i'm sure.

Anyway, that's that. And if you think this is all nonsense, well, let me inform you that it can't possibly be, 'cause i still have all my hair.