Listening to the Iranian radio during my daily commute, I hear a lot of doctor commercials. There seems to be a preponderance of two particular medical specialties advertising their services to the Iranian Community in Southern California: hair transplant doctors and doctors specializing in laser hair removal. The logical conclusion for any unbiased listener hearing these ads would be that we are a community of balding men and hairy women.
What an irony! Half of us are losing our desperately needed hair on top while the other half is trying to get rid of their unwanted growth elsewhere on their bodies! If only the women could donate their excess body hair to the balding men, most of our hair issues would be resolved.
I think the doctors specializing in these two branches should somehow get together and synergize. There is a great opportunity here to stop waste and begin to recycle. Why zap the hair follicles with laser when you can harvest them transplant them on the hair-density-challenged heads of comb-over artists? God will not forgive such waste.
Male baldness occurs in every population, but if you are Iranian, Lebanese, or Jewish (regardless of nationality), your chances of follicular sparsity increase dramatically. Why, I don’t know. Is it because we are old populations? Maybe, but so are the Chinese and they don’t present as many baldies as we do.
Some even argue that balding people are more advanced from an evolutionary standpoint as they have shed (or are in the process of shedding) their hair; the last remnant of our ape ancestors. That’s plausible but how does that explain the hairy women? Did the evolutionary process circumvent them?…. Now, there’s a thought!
But seriously, is it some mutation in our genes that gave rise to the disproportionate number of bald men among us? If so, when and why did it exactly happen? Looking at the stone-reliefs at Persepolis you don’t see bald kings and soldiers. On the contrary, there is head after head of thick, long, wavy hair wherever you look.
Could it be the Greeks, the Arabs, the Turks, or the Mongols that mixed with us and caused this mutation? Unlikely, since none of these groups have as many bald people in their own populations as we do. It must be something we did to ourselves.
I don’t have an answer or even a hypothesis. Does anybody know? Does anybody care?
