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Robots: The New Cure for Baldness
juice writes "The NYTimes has a story on robots that will one day conduct hair-replacement surgery. Currently, it's a grueling, repetitive, 8 hours process. Perfect for a mindless drone."
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Speaking broadly, things that happen past the age of reproduction don't affect evolution or natural selection much, as the owner of the genes has either bred or not by then.
;-) One can hardly conduct "experiments" on this sort of thing.
Some exceptions exist for organisms which form societies, as ours do, but even then, those are the exceptions, not the rule. I think "hair loss" is perfectly adequately explained as a mutation that got into the gene pool (and remember that humanity has gone through at least one very small bottleneck and possibly more then one; you can look that up elsewhere) and just happened to spread along with other genes. No "explanation" is really necessary, IMHO.
That's just my opinion... but when it comes to these sorts of issues, it's hard to get anything better then that
Male pattern baldness is caused by certain men's hair follicles having a sensitivity to dihydrotestosterone (which is converted from testosterone by agents known as 5-alpha-reductates). The most popular non-topical anti-baldness drug on the market today, Propecia (Finasteride) works by blocking the 5-alpha-reductates to stop the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone. The funny thing is, Propecia is simply a smaller dose of drug used to treat swollen prostates - you can get the drug, Proscar (also Finasteride), for a quarter of the price, and it does the same job. The only difference is you have to cut the pills to get a smaller dose.
However, hair transplant surgery may be on its way out - apparently, about 6 years ago, researchers isolated the gene that caused the hair follicles to become sensitive to dihydrotestosterone. Currently, work is being done on developing a drug to block the operation of this gene, which, when it becomes active, starts the process of male pattern baldness. I'd wager that within 10-15 years you should be able to have a treatment in your teens to prevent you from going bald altogether, so if you're bald, at least your son won't have to be.
Disclaimer: all of the above is second hand from hearing my wife (who used to run a day procedure hospital specialising in hair transplants) explain the details of MPB to patients over the phone, so I may have some of the terms wrong...