Here's a better way to talk about hair

Short Wave

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🗓️ 6 October 2021

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

Humans have scalp hair. But why is human scalp hair so varied? Biological anthropologist Tina Lasisi wanted to find out. And while completing her PhD at Penn State University, she developed a better system for describing hair — rooted in actual science.

To hear more from Tina, check out these webinars: Why Care About Hair (https://bit.ly/3liJZ96) and How Hair Reveals the Futility of Race Categories (https://s.si.edu/3Dik6g8). And to dive deep into Tina's research, we recommend her paper, The constraints of racialization: How classification and valuation hinder scientific research on human variation (https://bit.ly/3DfDrOS)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey short waivers, we have reached a milestone. Today is our 500th published episode.
0:07.8	I know, five hundos. We really love making this show for you all, like a lot. And as a gift to the
0:14.5	team, can you do me a favor? Tell one friend or family member about shortwave. Tell them why you
0:20.1	love it and why they should listen to. We're committed to growing this community and bringing you
0:26.1	hundreds of episodes more. Okay, here we go. You're listening to shortwave from NPR.
0:35.9	Tina Lassici has some news for you that stuff growing on your head is technically fur. Humans
0:44.4	like to pretend that they're special and you know in some ways we are okay, but having a whole
0:52.6	different word for our fur, that's just vanity. That's right. Our hair is technically fur on our
0:59.3	heads. Just keratinized fiber growing from scalp follicles. But for your vanity and for mine,
1:06.1	we're going to call it scalp hair. And Tina is one of the few biological anthropologists in the
1:10.9	world who studies it. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at Penn State University who works on human
1:17.1	evolution and specifically the evolution of human scalp hair. Tina first got curious about the
1:22.0	evolution of human scalp hair in college. She was in her first biological anthropology class
1:27.7	and her teacher pulled out this world map showing the distribution of UV radiation. So where UV
1:34.0	rays hit the most closest to the equator. And right next to it, the teacher had a map of the
1:39.1	distribution of skin pigmentation. And it absolutely mirrored that map of UV radiation almost perfectly.
1:47.5	And that just blew my mind. I had never thought about the fact that skin pigmentation varies in
1:54.8	this gradient wave. But seeing this map really made me think about how natural selection can
2:03.5	affect things in ways that are a lot more structured. And it immediately made me wonder, okay, so
2:10.8	now that I know why I'm brown, why is my hair curly? And that's what set me on this path where, you
2:17.6	know, eight years later, I'm still asking questions about the evolution of hair. Tina has come a lot
2:22.8	closer to answering these questions using some really cool science. Wigs, mannequins, microscopes,
	...

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