I was at the St. Louis Zoo last weekend checking out the chimps and got to see the hairless one again.
http://www.stlzoo.org/...impanzeesoffragileforest/cinder.htm
Now, this chimp is hairless from the disease
alopecia universalis(says the website), not a genetic mutation. But I would still like to discuss how major changes occur in a species. I would like to discuss how a population of hairless chimps could come about. I’ll explain how I think it could happen and I would like people to help me by pointing out my errors or adding new information.
In order for this hairless trait to occur in many chimps, it would have to be a result of a genetic mutation. And this mutation would have to dominate the hair gene, and be passed on to offspring, of which some would be hairless and some would not. Then we could get a few hairless chimps that could breed and make more hairless chimps. If the environment allowed these chimps to survive, we could have a population of a species in which some had hair and some didn’t. To make a transition to a hairless species, the environment would have to be more favorable for chimps without hair, perhaps deadly for chimps with hair. Or, there could be sexual selection involved in which hairless chimps were preferred mates. After many generation of selection, the population could move to totally hairless.
Make sense?
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