Baldyman
As some people may have noticed, I myself am starting (only now, not for years, oh no) to show the signs of male pattern baldness. As such it’s quite prevalent in my mind, especially as we approach another winter (not that I’ve been balding during other winters, oh no).
Baldness strikes me as strange. I’ve heard tales that it’s connected to high levels of testosterone in the body, but at the same time it does strike me as an evolutionary disadvantage, even in these days of hats and central heating. However, for me the strangeness of baldness comes from the rather directed nature of the beast – I’m losing hair from the top of my head, but not from anywhere else, as my luxuriant beard and beautiful legs will attest. So my head, known anecdotally as the main place where heat is lost (although scientifically that seems to be generally due to the lack of covering that the rest of the body traditionally has), is the place where most of my hair is disappearing despite that same hair being the main insulator of said cranium – something that doesn’t strike me as a bonus.
Now, I do like wearing hats. My immediate reason for this is not being used to scattered light coming from above, but that situation is a kind of self fulfilling condition started due to my fondness of wearing baseball caps at university combined with barely seeing the sun for those 4 years – my coder paleness has come from a long pedigree, although these days I do see way too much sunlight and almost look like a real person. However, I don’t see that a couple of thousand years, at a maximum, of hat usage is going to push the successful breeders in mankind towards a pattern of male pattern baldness – evolution is a long process and it must take at least a few years more than the rather, on an evolutionary scale, short history of the hat to make any serious changes to our barnets. I know that natural selection isn’t such an easy study, especially as we were all made as a perfect form by (a) mysterious sky pixie(s) [artificially contentious statement made for attempted humour reasons], but as a non-scientist I don’t think I’m going to start seriously delving into what related traits the addition of baldness has got genetic supermen like myself.
But in the end, as Dr Kermode said on t’radio t’other week, the observation that bald men have more testosterone is probably just a rumour spread by bald men, a tradition I am happy to continue. In fact, I think it needs more – not only is it a sign of high testosterone, it is a general indication of higher intelligence and pleasant odour. Although I suspect that last one is too easily experimentally testable to last long. Ho hum, all good rumours should have one bit that sounds false, it makes it all sound as if it could be real…
This post brought to you in order to justify posting a giant picture of my beautiful face in the middle of your monitor/friends page/rss feed. Look upon my beauty and despair
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Posted: October 24th, 2008 under blog.