9 'Amazing Facts' That Are Totally Untrue

4. Ginger People Are Going Extinct

Climate change is definitely bad news for polar bears and waterfront property owners, but (if you believe the press) it could also spell doom for the redheaded population.

The theory goes that ginger genes evolved in response to a cool, cloudy existence in western Europe in order to maximise the amount of vitamin D people could absorb from sunlight. Apparently, now that climate change is heating things up, this recessive adaptation is going to die out.

This is is a big claim considering that it's not how genetics, climate change nor human evolution works.

The redhead gene is recessive, meaning that both parents would have to be carriers for the child to be ginger, but for it to die out completely, all carriers would have to stop having sex. As modern humans are now largely unaffected by evolutionary pressures, climate change probably wouldn't have much of an effect on this, even if it were to make the world uniformly sunnier (which it won't).

By an amazing coincidence, it appears that this rumour was started by a genetic ancestry testing company. Strange.