Genetics and Auburn Hair – Saturday 10th June 2023

Genetics and Auburn Hair – Saturday 10th June 2023

I knew I had Auburn hair because people (family, friends and very often strangers) would touch my hair or look at it and speak about it to my mother.
I was perhaps a decade in age when I noticed I had brown eyes as well as Auburn hair and had a distant awareness that I had never seen another child with same.
I only ever noticed three children from all those school years (incl. highschool) with that combination, but they were boys and their eyes weren’t dark except for one. They were all quite verbal and I didn’t get the sense they were like me.
There was a little girl that I was drawn to and she had ver blonde hair with eyes that were very dark and her skin was pale and without knowing anything about genetics, I knew there was something similar about us. She wasn’t disabled. Her family had to move away and she once wrote me and that was when I knew I couldn’t write a letter. Hours and hours trying. She was just lovely and I missed her very much.
I was always conscious of anybody with Auburn hair and there are many different shades from really orange to blondish with a slight reddish tint to the shade like mine.
I noticed that on tv it was very rare to see someone with Auburn hair. I wondered about that and I suspect that all people are conscious of that colour hair. Some people love it and some can’t stand it. Hence the saying, “I hope all your children have red hair”.
When it comes to hair, you get what you get. My advice to someone with that fiery red and pale eyebrows lashes etc. If you aren’t comfortable with it, go to the salon and get your eyebrows tinted to a shade you feel more comfortable with etc.
The Neanderthal had the Auburn hair and it was common, though it wouldn’t have been so earlier on in their time here.
Here and now, it’s very likely that we have more Auburn haired people than we did several decades ago. And I note that some photos or footage of primates shows the odd Auburn colouring present too.
For me to have Auburn hair and brown eyes, my mother and father each had to carry the gene or marker for Auburn hair and then my genetics had a recombination in order for me to have brown eyes with it and this all was not the random event as it might seem. It happened in order to give me the best outcome because my genome was aware that I was going to have a Rett Syndrome condition in my genetics and it turned it into a duplication event which offered the best outcome and it could do this because a bunch of unusual things were all present. Without those selection of things occurring together, I would have likely had what is/was? known as a classic mutation in the mecp2 gene and possibly not survived it.
It does go through my mind at times, and think of all that occurring at the genetic level, to then go through all that followed in my life, to find myself now doing the work that I do. I should like to add that in my teen years and starting a clerical position, the Forman would call me sweet f a. Of course that was my initials too but it was his joke because I also have such a severe learning disability which was much more obvious then. And because they didn’t know about RS, I was thought to be quite slow. If he was to see my writing nowadays, he’d not believe it. My thought is, never judge a book by its cover.

It needs said that Auburn hair isn’t something that’s bad, people generally get that pigment colour from the selection process that occurs at conception and is passed from mum and/or dad. My parents themselves had very dark hair.
The mutation for Auburn hair commenced at some point, somewhere however, and I have a theory as to what initially provokes the first mutation for Auburn hair to occur.
Each person has their own unique genetic sequence. Identical twins still have some tiny differences, which set them apart and there is a reason. Molecular rules that prevent any person being repeated. In our mothers’ genetics is a record of how many in the ancestral line came before, and how many children conceived. In my genetics is how many children my mother conceived and so my child is a next step in that record of which I too am on. There can never be another you or me and that’s the rule and it can’t be changed.

Because we are so intelligent and able Ie. hand use etc. these features all take up much more of our genetic instructions and we need to manage ourselves from a genetic point of view. We have less wiggle room than most other species. So in the future, when we decide to have children, we need to understand our genes and share them with that special person and we need to be sure that it’s a good match lest we cause our child to have needless difficulties.
Fiona MacLeod (C)