For eight months, an erudite debate has roiled the letters column of the journal Science. At sober issue: How did man lose his body hair?
Geneticist Bentley Glass incited the fuss last winter when he suggested that human bodies began balding as soon as warm clothes ended the need for tufted torsos. Scoffing, one writer charged Glass with Lamarckianism, the discredited 1809 theory of French Naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who argued that giraffe necks grew long because the animals preferred eating treetop leaves and that such acquired characteristics could be passed on...
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