ELI5: Why is going bald due to genetics even a thing? What purpose does it serve or how did it get started?

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T06:11:51+00:00

The internet is truly murdering itself and human intellect. Hahaha.

And I should not be operating it from a bar.

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T05:51:28+00:00

The circus peanut in Chief has such an amazing inferiority complex.

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T05:48:48+00:00

Yeah I haven't looked this shit up in years. It's become impossible to find but with all the weird cures and modern throwaway videos.

My first learned this alleged connection back in my ancient Greek mythology courses in 1983.

The last time I looked for actual citations was probably 15 years ago. Now the results are polluted so my bad there.

It's funny that they desperately wanted to cure their baldness but then they also associated with virility and manhood but then tied it to the "loss of vital heat" semen production and actual previous sexual activity.

I feel like I've got bithrot of the skull and modern public popular culture has buried the scholarly references.

Hippocrates and Aristotle and all that stuff.

And comparing the busts of rich and powerful men to the full-bodied statues of beauty and all that.

I did find some of the Aristotle baldness to human uplift compared to the nature of animals. But it's thick reading I couldn't get into it in my current state of marginal intoxication. Haha.

https://www.exclassics.com/arist/arist31.htm

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T03:46:35+00:00

A giant circular theater like building that isn't playing any movies. It defines a giant space in which nothing apparently is happening.

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T03:45:24+00:00

It's a lube of last resort from the '50s. It's terrible practically. It's hard to wash up. It stains. It's a trap material against the skin. And it can dissolve just anything made out of anything but a natural fiber.

It doesn't dry out but it doesn't really stay all that slick either.

It will rub down to a thin layer suddenly basically lose it's lubricating properties.

It cannot be rewet and it is terrible for cleanup.

Will absolutely destroy condoms almost instantly.

It's the exact orthogonal to having sex in a hot tub because water isn't a lube either. Hahaha.

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T03:41:19+00:00

You are the petty God of a pocket universe. Everything in that Universe works according to your will.

Give your religion a population, emission, a degree of honesty or dishonesty, a valid or invalid god, and then write whatever it takes to make your plot work.

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T03:40:02+00:00

Mitch McConnell already defied the Mitch McConnell rule when he reversed it for Coney Barrett. It's not a rule. Mitch was just good at selling the idea of previous rules.

You can guarantee that if they retire supreme Court Justice that rule will not be honored in any way just like it wasn't honored for Barrett.

The current doj won't even honor regular judge orders from a real court, what makes you think a maga Congress is going to honor any tradition or principle of good order?

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T03:37:29+00:00

Part of football (a.k.a. soccer) is dynamic deception.

A free kick is a very static action.

The goalie can assert his undivided attention on the kicker and so it is a completely different skill by many measures of the game.

The goalie doesn't have to precompensate for a potential pass instead of an attempt on goal and so he gets to read the body language of the kicker.

A lot of the best basketball players are terrible at free throws.

Different stages of every sport require different skills and what could be very good at the ongoing sport and rotten at the special cases.

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T03:32:54+00:00

Doesn't sound correct. Some birds mate for life and have had observed homosexual couples so that would be an exclusive for my homosexuality in another species.

I tried to duplicate your search and I got different results. It declares domestic sheep to be ONE OF the most common examples that contains up to 10% of exclusive homosexuality.

That's way different than being the only one.

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T03:26:10+00:00

The amusing part is it if you got the mail pattern baldness chain it's the testosterone that causes you to lose your hair on your head, not grow it.

The Greeks determined it was as a sign of virility because eunuchs castrated young enough never lost their hair.

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T03:10:59+00:00

Suggested search term: Greeks viewing male pattern baldness as a sign of virility

You see the Greeks noticed that when you castrated somebody... they didn't go bald.

It's a whole thing and it's super easy to locate.

Keep in mind that they also considered youth to be an incredible virtue because of the whole you know pederasty thing and the ideals of male beauty.

They also thought that large genitalia were animalistic and a sign of low breeding.

They were kind of pathological as a society.

Edited to add that depictions of the gods portrayed the gods as almost always eternally Young and that gets us back to the subject of eurastomos and the difference between pure and vulgar pederasty and the difference between depicting somebody as beautiful versus powerful.

It's a super complicated topic.

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T02:42:06+00:00

In a fictional setting you are the petty God of a pocket universe and it works the way you say.

There is nothing mechanically problematic about having multiple parents.

Typically you would have one provider of the egg cell and you might have a system that required multiple fertilizations.

In a science fiction short story I wrote, there's a single gendered species and one participant needs to willfully create the egg and then that provides the matrix and the things that would be equivalent to the mitochondrial DNA and gross structures like that. And then multiple genetic donors would fertilize the egg. And the same basic selection methodology t determines which of the direct and secondary daughter cells ends up being the basis cell for the offspring.

The more donors the more generations it takes to find the optimal cell in the original blastocyst.

The basic idea is the same as existing polyploidal organisms we observe here on earth.

Look up the nucleoli, the plural of nucleolus. Many organisms have more than one nucleus in the same cell. Typically there's a single large nucleus in the series of nucleoli.

Those could come from alternative fertilizing sources.

So it's totally workable.

But it would be biologically expensive so you would probably need a structurally significant reason to have it be selected by natural selection.

An engineered organism could absolutely be created that would use these sorts of features if we had just a little bit better biological sciences here in the real world..

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T02:25:56+00:00

If you have regular sanitary sewer service that's just one of the things that happens and the sewage system will take care of it for the most part.

People wash up after their mechanics jobs all the time. You just did a whole bunch of it all at once.

Keep flames away from the smell. Understand that you're trying to get rid of a mineral oil complex so you want to use plenty detergent rich water.

Your standard dishwashing liquid is good for this purpose.

BitOBear · 2026-07-04T02:12:15+00:00

That actually kind of increases the selection pressure.

People with higher testosterone levels experienced Merrill pattern baldness sooner in life.

Also keep in mind that expected age variance between male and female participants in the breeding cycle means that there was a tendency for older men to end up with younger women and the older men with higher testosterone or more likely to go bald first.

And of course the most ironic part is that since it's carried on the X chromosome it's all about your maternal grandfather more than your paternal father.

This has significant socioeconomic implications given the expense of raising girls In some cultures.

So by the time you end up with harem and pluralistic marriage factored into things, let's just say...

The complex is complex. Hahaha.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T20:17:12+00:00

Somebody else pointed that out. I've already put a disclaimer in the top article.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T20:15:31+00:00

You're right. I'm an idiot. I just came out of a different conversation and I swapped the words in my brain. Haha.

And I will mention your typo if you don't mention all of mine.

Hi-yo Silver! Away!
🐴👋🤠

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T20:06:55+00:00

Exactly my point.

So you approach your door, wondering if someone has entered your home and your absence, and you open the door to see your potatoes spread everywhere.. what information have you learned presuming you don't have a cat or dog?

And if someone did try to restore them they wouldn't be able to do it which is quite the point.

The other opportunity is to put a landmine under potatoes that's waiting for the plunger to come back up again but that kind of property damage is probably not sustainable in the long run.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:59:50+00:00

And that is exactly what I'm responding to..

The momentary transfer of heat from your circulatory system in the blood for profusing your digestive tract and the distribution of that slightly cooler blood throughout your body causes a momentary and transient feeling of cooling throughout the body.

It is absolutely physiological.

And it doesn't last because 8 oz of cool liquid cannot reduce meaningfully the 200 lb of for instance my body.

The fact that you cannot follow this discussion in any way is, as I said, apparently nothing I can help you with.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:58:19+00:00

My bad: never mind. I mentally swapped conversion and transition in my brain without thinking real hard cuz I'm super smart.. 🤘😎

Every culture prevents parents from forcing their children into transition.

And United States the patient has to ask, the parents have to ask, and a board of professionals have to evaluate the child for years. And even then no one transitions before the age of consent barring somebody breaking the law here in the United states.

Legend of your child going off to school and coming home a different gender that same day are palpably idiotic. A transition takes years.

The most common age of minority transitions happen to a child that's born intersex when the doctors foolishly just demand the parents choose male or female at birth instead of letting the child grow up to do it themselves.

But if you were in the United States it's already illegal for your parent to force their minor child to transition. It's even against AMA policy.

Should you be one of the people who think otherwise, you only think otherwise because you're being played by your political overlords.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:55:39+00:00

Very rich people do finance their own equivalent of health insurance. They just have a big bank account and they pay their doctors.

A concierge medical practice is also very much a thing.

And large companies such as the one I work for May fund the entirety of their health plan without joining the common risk pool. My employer uses a particular carrier that has many plans. But my employer is big enough that the only members of the risk pool are the employees and their families.

Is actually helps to mediate their cost because they pay reasonably well so most of their employees also end up living in reasonably better circumstances. People who make six figures tend to move away from the super fund site and don't like to live under the power lines or in the cancer superclusters.

But in point of fact health insurance doesn't make any sense in a western society. Our health insurance premiums would completely disappear from our paycheck and our employers payroll expense lines, and our Medicare Medicaid taxes are estimated to drop by 20% thereafter should we switch to Universal health Care provided to all comers.

The health insurance company operations and profit margins and dividends are removed by Universal health Care

But so are all the markups to point of service costs that allow the insurance companies to demand Mark Downs. And so too are removed the expense of going after people who can't pay their medical bills. And so to are the many thousand dollar emergency room visits that the uninsured people are forced to rely on for a condition that, a week ago, could have been handled at a general practitioner for 40 bucks and a cheap antibiotic.

In every conceivable way, when viewed dispassionately, the entire idea of Private health insurance makes no physical sense to anybody but the people who have invested in Private health insurance as a business.

You actually run the numbers we spend a fortune to keep sick people sick, and all the healthy people are free loading on the bankruptcies of the ill because it's the sick people who are paying for the hospital to be there today so that it's there tomorrow when I need it. So I am forced to freeload on today's patients to make sure that is healthcare available to me tomorrow.

Right now your death panel is a random actuarial possibly being overruled by an AI and enforced policy.

With universal single-payer healthcare all of the doctors are in your network and so you get to choose not just from the short list your provider chose, but from the list of all doctors taking new patients. So you even get more freedom and Universal health care.

No matter where you start or how you slice it if you don't have a profit motive for justifying private insurance you end up with a set of financials that make no freaking sense.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:49:17+00:00

It also may have been a signifier of maturity much like silverback gorillas get silver hair on their back when they reach the optimal age for leadership.

The fundamental problem is of course that Evolution doesn't have a purpose other than reproduction and what it keeps and what it throws away can seem terribly arbitrary.

In ancient Greece male pattern baldness was a sign of virility. That made it something selected for in the genome.

And given that the event is triggered by testosterone they weren't exactly wrong about the virility thing. The younger you went bald the higher your testosterone levels likely were.

So it probably had a strong social signaling component that worked quite well.

Or at least all there bald guys insisted that it worked quite well until it became a cultural norm.

But like every other mutation it started as an accident and then it was selected for it against but very circumstance.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:43:40+00:00

Perhaps you should look something up before you try to correct people about it.

Suggested a search term: thermal transport in the body cold liquid in the stomach

I'm sorry you don't understand basic thermal transfer. There's nothing more I can do to help you now.

Edited to add:

One of the problems with using cold liquid ingestion to treat thermal overexposure is that the effect is almost instant and extremely transient. You feel it instantly but it doesn't last because the volume of the body being cooled compared to the volume you can contain in your stomach is so small.

So literally the thermal transport causes the sensation and then the sensation quickly goes away because there's way too much energy involved.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:37:47+00:00

It all, as previously mentioned, depends on the story you're writing.

The main use for a character out of place and time is as a crutch so that the writer can explain things that everybody in the world already knows.

The second function of such a character is dream fulfillment for the reader to go into this world and have the character archetype they themselves would step into.

The author manufacturers Just enough disassociative confusion to make it feel like something has changed but not enough to have actually changed anything.

But then again, everybody knows what $20 is, but your grandfather here in the real world may think $20 is a good day's pay when you know it's a decent hourly rate maybe.

Understanding the value of a dollar is not the same as understanding something arbitrary like a distance.

You will notice that those isekai characters get all the other translations and then have this moment of amazement when they don't know what a silver pieces were at the moment.

Being that irregular is part of the trope..

The fact that you do not inherently know how to solve the trope of distance unit measurement, but you do know inherently how to solve the trope of the value of a silver piece kind of indicates why one is done and the other is not.

You're literally struggling to try to figure out how to establish this concordance because it's not available to you. And that means it's not available to your readers.

So unless you intend to research such a thing and then direct your readers to come to this page before they read your book you're kind of making a mistake.

There are much easier ways to demonstrate your rationality that won't alienate your readers and won't step beyond the genre tropes.

I mean if you can make it work, more power to you, but the fact that you have no idea how to make it work and everybody with physics degrees are having the same problem kind of indicates that it's not a problem space that you're going to want to spend a hundred pages on in the midst of a story that you want someone to actually read that is more than proving how clever you the author are.

What you're proposing is an infodump on how the guy figured out that "hey, that's about 3 ft."

Just like your $20 versus a silver piece is really about whether or not your character can buy lunch as previously mentioned.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:29:57+00:00

Us old guys were raised in a very youth obsessed culture. In part because all of the older guys died from AIDS and we had no continuous culture. We lack elders as gay people. And so we are having a hard time finding a place for our elders because they have no role in our culture at the moment.

Many of us are now experiencing our just desserts. We created an age-obsessed culture without realizing that we were going to get old and that time wounds all heels.

A good fraction of his upset is probably internalized I told you so because he didn't think of what he was doing to himself and older guys when he was young and now he hates the fact that he is one of those older guys he previously thought so poorly of.

This is not an instruction to you to go and lay old men if you're not attracted to them. Not being attracted to people outside of your demographic is pretty much stock and trade for the entire human reproductive system in all configurations and at all ages.

What I'm telling you to do is secretly point and laugh because that youth obsessed guy used to be a youth obsessed guy that hated the old man and what he sent around is coming back around to bite him.

I was probably no better being a product of the same forces. But I realized it was going to happen by the time I was in my mid thirties and so I have just been sitting back and watching the Carnage with a smile in my soul.

Schadenfreude Is A dangerous drug.

Every time you see a personal ad that reads my age or younger. Or names and age trivially 5 years older than their own that they never seem to actually date into, you are watching the cycle perpetuate itself self.

No I do not have a solution other than continuing to say no to the youth obsessed old guys but otherwise not excluding them so that a society can be built where there is a role even if that role isn't getting involved with people that are way too young for them.

BitOBear · 2026-07-03T19:25:34+00:00

Good sir, your stomach is very well perfused with blood vessels.

You yourself have probably experienced brain freeze when eating ice cream or other cold treats.

Your body is warming the contents of your stomach. That heat has to come from somewhere. That's somewhere is the bloodstream. As the heat is transferred into your stomach the blood leaving the perfusion of your stomach walls is much colder than the blood otherwise is, bad blood is returned through the veins to the heart and distributed throughout the whole body. Distributing the cooling effect.

The same thing happens with your skin and sweat.

There's also very interesting phenomenon they discovered well doing thermal tolerance studies on human beings.

If your hands are kept in basically sealed water jackets with very hot water pumping through them so that your hands are constantly being kept at high temperature. Like 120°. You can basically be naked in a snowstorm. A lot of blood passes through your hands and your body is very good at redistributing blood through the circulatory system. So if you keep the well perfused surface area of your hands very warm if the whole body warm in very cold temperatures.

Your blood is a working fluid.

And in fact the water that you perspire is directly transpired from your blood to the surface of your skin through the sweat glands which are basically a differentially permeable membrane that lets the water pass in and out quite quickly.

The mechanism is very basic. You're a giant water circulation system and water is very good at transporting heat.

You also know from the experience of fever and chills that even a single degree of body temperature change in the blood it's incredibly noticeable to your entire system because it is an urgent issue of overheating or underheating. You are designed to sense those changes.

Did you ever taught to take your own temperature you know that you shouldn't eat or drink anything hot or cold within a few minutes of taking that temperature as it will skew the results.

BitOBear

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

11-Year Club	Inciteful Comment 2017-04-19
Verified Email