Why are we naked?

One of the spanners that creationists would no doubt love to throw in the gears of evolution is the apparent lack of body hair or fur on us humans, compared to say apes or this ridiculously hairy dog. What evolutionary advantage could hairlessness possibly provide, aside from making us humans ridiculously sexy? The answer lies - in an obscure round-a-bout way - with Jessica Alba.

By now I'm sure that you're aware of how evolution takes place, but in case you're not I'll cover it briefly. Within DNA there is encoded an incredible amount of information about the development of the organism that contains it. This code, as a species reproduces, has a tendancy to change due to occassional mutations. These mutations can sometimes prove beneficial to an organism's survival, thus allowing said organism to reproduce and push that mutation along down the species' lineage.

Some mutations are rather trivial and have little or no effect on survival, such as eye colour, hair colour and difference in skin pigmentation. Other mutations, such as those that produce *ahem* features like Jessica Alba's are indeed beneficial to the reproductive process. That being said, there is a large gap between the appearance most would consider worthy of courting, and the appearance of "beautiful people" like Alba and Brad Pitt. This is the main reason why we still have a wide range of appearances - we're not simply evolving into Jessica Albas. The truth is, when it comes to appearance, most people will settle for whatever they can get. Now, about the hair thing...

There are a few theories as to why humans have evolved into our current, relatively hairless state. One of these theories, and my personal favourite, is that those of us who were born with significantly less hair than others found themselves much less prone to parasites that would otherwise be thriving in a thick coating of hair. With our ability to create fire and stay warm at night, this development did not have a negative impact on our survivability, and thus increased it. It's possible that as we progressed, we began to associate hairlessness with healthiness, and thus chose less hairy people as mates. This would go a long way to explain why women are less hairy than men, and why they care a lot less about hair on men, than we do about hair on women.

So you see? It's all about evolution trying to make us more appealing to the opposite sex. Oh, plus the whole parasite thing, but the Jessica Alba part is much more exciting.