h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'd really rather see food stuff wiped away with a hand rather than licked off.. just me perhaps judging by the response I had to that from you hairy lot!

You've got a point there, but when there's no napkin available, to me it seems preferable to lick the food off rather than use your hand and then have no place to wipe the hand.

Well there is one place you could wipe your hand...

Food particles being caught in the beard prevents them from falling to the ground and attracting hordes of ants. Although beards are obviously a holdover from when we all had full-body hair, why have women lost them faster than have we? Might I take this moment to congratulate our ancestors, who evidently decided at some point that women were far more attractive as mates without hairy faces.

I too would like to thank them as I feel sure that if I had face hair I'd be far too lazy to shave, so yes, well done to natural selection for that, now for the future, lets all concentrate on small skulls (having been through the agony of childbirth I feel this is something we should consider..)

I don't think trying for small skulls is gonna work. For that we'd have to develop smaller brains.

But if our ancestors had decided that women with hairy faces were more attractive, we'd have inherited that predisposition and see nothing wrong with it. You'd probably be thanking natural selection for that right now.

Did someone mention hairy faced women? Mmmmmm...

The hair on your head is an insulating feature as most heat is lost from the body that way, therefore more hair has to grow on the head than on the rest of the body.

I think the length of hair on the rest of your body has something to do with clothes as - as far as i'm aware - hair on other primates bodies does grow just as much as on their head. In a nutshell, monkeys don't wear jeans.

It's more a cooling thing as well as insulating rather than just the latter - for the same reason our 'nads still have hair when they're better off a couple of degrees cooler than the rest of us, hair can also wick sweat away from the skin, taking a little heat away too if evaporation isn't doing its job properly.
Maybe it was retained as a signal that puberty has been reached - after all, women have pubes too. Maybe extra musculature wasn't noticeable enough on it's own in men and hairy bits were selected for, un-hairy post-pubescent males lpsing out and not breeding. Maybe pubes remain as a means of cushioning sensitive areas during vigorous copulation.


Time to go and get some crumbs in my beard. Maybe I'll let some beer get in it tonight. It might even do it some good.

no hats are for keeping the head warm, if god had meant us to have hair on our heads then he wouldn't have invented them.

He wouldn't have invented heads?

This god fellow is really beginning to sound like a nasty piece of work, in my book.

So then, if I follow correctly : God didn't mean us to have hair on our heads, therefore he didn't invent heads, but he did invent hats?

Why would he then have invented hats, if he didn't invent something to put them on in the first place? Therefore, god couldn't really exist.

As good an argument for evolution and natural selection as I've ever heard.

*raises 2 metaphorical fingers* hats you polish cheese maker

Did God invent hats before He invented combs?

Must have. After all, before the advent of combs every day must have been what my friend Laura calls "a hat day."

>>Has anyone managed to get them long enough so that you can brush them back to hide baldness?<< John Howard

3:-&thorn;

just noticed

on ITS own with no apostrophe
lOsing out

sorry.

Ah, but surely after combs evolved, then hats would have become extinct? Unless we're in some sort of 'transition period', and witnessing the slow extiction of the comon or garden hat. It's probably that global warming that's doing it.

Hopefully the hat will make a comeback when middle-aged incipient slaphead sagginggutmen realise that wigs look stupid, comb-overs look stupid and that spraypaint stuff that is supposed to thicken existing hair as bad as the other two combined. They probably won't want to flaunt their baldness by going for a grade 1 so will return to the hat craze so common in b/w footage of the postwar era. Maybe they will leave out the hats, reasoning that exercise warms the body up and removes the large guts from about their midriffs whereas hats merely warm the head to the point of clammy sweatiness. It has been suggested as truth that some businessmen, needlessly fearing the mocking of their peers, would rather cut their knackers off to slow down hair loss that admit to being bald but virile. Weird times.

But even with combs around, there is still _some_ need for hats. After all, there are still bad hair days...just not as many.