Apparently the question as to why some people have oily ear wax and other people have drier ear wax is an an "anthropologist's riddle."
Dry ear wax? It's genetic! You should definitely take two minutes to read this article, as it's earth-shattering findings will no doubt profoundly affect your life. Also it's kind of funny how earnestly excited the researchers are about ear wax. But it was not my own exuberance for ear wax that compelled me to write. No, it was the following phrase:
"Dry earwax may have given people in northeast Asia some advantage during past periods of cold climate, not freezing as readily, the researchers suspect, but 'this is still pretty speculative.'"
I bet you that the phrase that preceded this claim of freeze-proof ear wax went something like this, 'Look, I got nothing. It's bad enough that this is what I have to f******g research and now you want to bother me about why this is? I have no f*****g clue why this is, if you really want I can just pull some stupid guess out of my a** and you can bite me.' For obvious reasons, this quote was edited out.
Nonetheless, someone please enlighten to me as to how this suggestion could even be true. Because think about it: If it's cold enough to freeze ear wax -- a semi-liquid substance that is in a cavity inside your head -- you have got much much bigger problems. If you aren't already dead, you probably have lost all your digits and your nose to frost bite and your tongue is probably frozen to the roof of your mouth. If being resistant to the cold was really so important that natural selection would select for individuals with advantages against the cold, then wouldn't Asian people be fat and squat, and covered in fur? Nope, apparently they have flaky ear wax. If this article has proven anything (besides the fact that I need to stop reading the headlines that yahoo posts near my email inbox) it is that not all genetic research is worthwhile.
* please, if you are a geneticist, I welcome you to enlighten me about the nuances of this research that have no doubt been lost on me. I know that I am generally pretty clueless when it comes to science, but the logic of that suggestion (the admission that it was speculative notwithstanding) just didn't seem to follow.
3 comments:
Did you know that if you do a medline search (www.pubmed.org) of research on earwax, you get 544 papers? It's amazing. Some are entitled thigs like: "Cotton bud and ear cleaning--a loose tip cotton bud?" and "Is it normal for me to have more earwax than I did when I was younger?"
These scientists were actually building off of previous research done on earwax! And to be fair to them, their findings are by far more interesting than "Morphological and functional alterations of ear in lysosomal neuraminidase gene deficient mouse."
I cannot confirm the rationale about the dry earwax, but can confirm I was taught this in a med school class last year, however the statement that was made compared Europeans to eastern Asians, not just the Siberians but the "Orientals"...so I would reject this earwax freezing crap.
Thanks my scientist friends!
Post a Comment