TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Jolly Heretic. Now, a video is doing the rounds on Twitter of two young, not very attractive men being ostentatiously happy about the fact that they can purchase a halal English breakfast.
"I've been a Muslim nine years, and I've been missing a full English breakfast. I'm gonna give you— This is halal? Halal bacon, bruv. Halal bacon! Come on, shut up! Halal sausage! Halal sausage! I can't believe it!" These are English men, these are white men, and they have found that in Leeds, they can purchase a halal traditional English breakfast involving turkey sausages and suchlike nonsense.
These people are Muslim converts—white Muslim converts. One of the indicators they are Muslim converts is the way that they, in such an over-the-top way, use Islamic language. They say things like, "Oh, Allahu Akbar, we can buy an English breakfast. Oh, inshallah, there is an English breakfast, whatever. We do sausage and bacon?"
"We do sausage and bacon. Oh, mashallah. Allahu sausage and bacon. Allahu Akbar. Okay, let's go." In a way, an actual person who had been raised as a Muslim, being more secure in being a Muslim, wouldn’t need to, as it were, Muslim-signal so obviously. But the second thing that indicates they are Muslim converts is, of course, the fact that—well, they have ginger hair.
And one of the things that has been commented on in this video is: why is it that every time Muslim converts—white Muslim converts—appear to have ginger hair? And I am going to answer that question in this video. Before I do, could you please do me a favor? Even if you are ginger, could you subscribe?
Could you subscribe here on YouTube and could you subscribe to my sub-site, thejollyheretic.com, where I put all the most basic stuff I can’t put on YouTube—where I put in-person interviews, where I put vlogs, where I put films that I make, where I put my live streams on Mondays at 7, where I put all kinds of fascinating stuff?
And if you like what I do, you can support me for the cost of just a pint of beer a month. But most importantly, just subscribe. It costs nothing. Subscribe. I can’t tell you how much it helps YouTubers if you do that—and leave a comment, and leave a like, and boost the algorithm. Cheers, and thanks a lot.
Okay, back to the video. So, we’re not imagining it when we say that Muslim converts seem to be ginger. I know of only one white Muslim convert here in Oli, where I live. He used to sit in the mosque and help out. And he was, of course, young. And ginger. And there was a break—Bart looked at the coverage in British newspapers of white jihadis between August 20, 2013, and August 2014, and they found that overall, 76% of them had red hair. Looking at the archive of the Mail Online, 69% of white jihadis had red hair, and looking at the archive of The Guardian, 100% of white jihadis had red hair. Now, red hair—about one to two percent of people in Europe have red hair. It rises to about seven percent, something like that, of people in the UK, and of people in Iceland—or ten percent of people in the UK and people in Iceland, something like that—rising in Scotland and Ireland to about fourteen or fifteen percent.
But, I mean, even so, it does seem extraordinary. I mean, they haven’t given me statistics as to how they’re overrepresented or whatever, or what the sample size is, but it does always seem to be that jihadis—white jihadis—have red hair. Now, why would this be the case? In order to understand why this is the case, we have to go back to the nature of red hair and what red hair kind of achieves in evolutionary terms. How did red hair—red hair came about, if the anthropologist Peter Frost is correct, in a context (and remember that women are much more likely to be red-haired than men) of an extreme selection event.
In Western Europe, there were already perhaps small numbers of people that had red hair, but in Western Europe, we relied on hunting dogs, big game, and men would go out and they would hunt big game and they would get killed. As a consequence, there were relatively few men in comparison to the number of females.
Now, if there are relatively few men in comparison to the number of females, what this leads to is runaway competitive selection to try to get those men. One of the ways that you do that is by either novel adaptations, which are rather like a peacock’s tail, really, with bright colors—things like that which make you unusual and different and make you stand out and make you therefore attractive to the men because you stand out, because you’re different. And Peter Frost argues this is where European light coloring comes from.
It’s one of the reasons why we evolved blue eyes. You’ve got people that have brown skin, brown eyes, brown hair. And then, in order to stand out from the crowd and thus be more attractive to the men, the women start to evolve blue eyes, and blonde hair, and paler skin.
And then—and the paler skin is attractive, by the way, because pale skin in women, in general actually, is a marker of estrogen, and it’s a marker of ovulation. Women have paler skin when they ovulate. So paler skin is attractive. So you get runaway selection for pale skin. And you get runaway selection in general for lighter colors in women because these are associated with estrogen and therefore with being sexually fertile. And so then you get blue eyes, pale skin, blonde hair. And eventually, the most novel of all, you get very pale skin.
You get green eyes. And you get ginger hair. So this is the most novel thing. So, so, so it’s—and this is the newest. We know from genetic analyses, this is the newest set of colorings: very pale skin, green eyes, and ginger hair—all of which are associated with estrogen. And so this is what—this is how ginger hair comes about.
However, because it’s so new, and it’s a mutation, mutations tend to go together with other mutations. They are part of mutational load, and in general, mutations are bad. This mutation—ginger hair and green eyes and very pale skin—is not bad. In fact, if anything, it’s evolutionarily positive in very cloudy, cold, dark environments because the pale skin allows you to absorb more ultraviolet light from the sun and synthesize this into vitamin D, which is why when you go to very rainy, cloudy places like Ireland or Scotland, it’s up to 14 percent because these traits are being selected for.
But in general, they will come together with traits that are bad. And ginger hair, very pale skin, green eyes—it’s so new in evolutionary terms that it hasn’t had time yet to decouple from all of the bad mutations that it comes together with. The consequence: people that have ginger hair have very poor health compared to everybody else.
They are elevated in certain kinds of pain sensitivity, they are elevated in skin cancer, they are elevated in Parkinson’s disease, they are elevated in rectal cancer, and they’re elevated—among women, obviously—in endometriosis. So you’ve got these people that are attractive, particularly the women.
The women are attractive to men because they are evolutionarily novel and interesting and unusual, and fast life-history strategists are attracted to that which is evolutionarily novel and unusual—but they are also sickly and therefore will die young. As a consequence of this, you end up with what’s called frequency-dependent selection.
So gingerness remains attractive because it is—by virtue of its association with these negative traits—it is kept at a very low level. This is not the case with things like blonde hair and blue eyes and pale skin. They have become—they came about so long ago that they’ve become uncoupled from the various mutations with which they are associated.
Ginger hair hasn’t had time for this to happen yet, with the consequence that you have frequency-dependent selection. The number of them is kept low by virtue of the illness with which they are generally associated. And this makes them, ironically, even more attractive in the case of the women, because there’s just not many of them.
They’re attractive because they’re novel. They remain attractive because they’re novel, because they’re unusual. This is frequency-dependent selection. So this is how you end up with ginger hair. Now, what this means is that women that have ginger hair—and there are studies on this from nightclubs—are more likely to get hit on.
It’s simply because their gingerness is saying to people: high levels of estrogen, high levels of fertility—these things are attractive. And of course, it’s just the fact that they’re unusual. And for a certain kind of fast life-history strategy—live fast, die young—male, a person that’s different from them, a person that’s unusual, might have, when you could be wiped out at any minute, some beneficial trait, and so therefore you’ll go for them.
But in general, the fact that they’re unusual—that’s also going to repel quite a lot of people because it could imply that they’re genetically mutated or something. So that’s horrible. So they’re rejected. And so consequently, you end up again with this small number of them—frequency-dependent selection.
So the males, however, are more likely to be rebuffed. Women are unattractive to men with ginger hair. They find them unattractive. Why? Because ginger hair, green eyes, pale skin is telling you estrogen. It’s telling you that the person is feminine, basically—is unattractive to women. So they’re more likely to be rebuffed.
Also, women are slower life-history strategists than men. They’re less—they’re evolved to an environment where you’re less likely to be wiped out at any minute. You know, they need to invest in their offspring rather than invest in sex, that kind of thing. So they’re slow—it slows down. And they want people that they can rely upon. They want people that are sort of similar to them. And so, for these various reasons then, ginger men are unattractive, on average, to females. I’m not saying there aren’t attractive ginger men. I’m just saying that on average—before someone comes out and says, “Oh God, I know so-and-so and he’s ginger.”
On average, they are unattractive to females. Now, so that’s the first thing that’s going to be a problem. And on average, because they’re different—simply because they’re different—they’re more likely to be bullied at school and so forth. So this is the first element of what’s going on. People—men, in particular men—that have ginger hair are more likely to be rebuffed by females, and they’re more likely to be bullied by other white people when they are young.
This is the kind of thing that will make you depressed, that will make you anxious, that will make you high in neuroticism—and those traits make you more likely to have a conversion experience. It is those traits that make your identity unstable. It is those traits that make you more likely to go through a period of religious fervor. It is those traits that make you more likely to convert to another religion—and then this conversion gives you a strong sense of identity. It makes you feel good and you feel happy and whatever—and that sort of thing. Secondly, you feel bullied and betrayed by your own group for being nasty to you. They’re bullying you, they’re rejecting you in nightclubs or whatever.
And so this is going to push you possibly to defect to another group. Now, from the perspective of that group, when you consider that group is non-white, there is a degree to which whiteness is associated with status. Women are evolved to sexually select for status. And I did a study years ago in which I showed that if you look at multicultural marriages in Finland, then the marriage is where it is of a Finnish man and a foreign woman—almost always the foreign woman is from a country that is poorer and less important than Finland. Whereas if it’s a Finnish woman and a foreign man, it’s almost always a man from a country that is richer and more significant and more important than Finland—because women sexually select for status, even when it comes to the nationality.
And presumably the race of the man—and that’s interesting as well, because we found the one outlier was that Finnish men, even though their country is less important and less rich than Japan, if they marry a Japanese person, it’s more likely to be a male Finn and a female Japanese. Why? Because the Japanese look up to whiteness—it’s associated with status—whiteness, Industrial Revolution, all the important things. So you’ve probably got that when it comes to the attitude of Muslim women to white converts: whiteness is associated with status, and so therefore they will go—it’s a way of getting women, essentially, to convert, to defect to Islam. So you can see what’s going on there.
The further issue there—and you’ve—so you’ve got the environmental factor of them being bullied and them being excluded and whatever—that makes—and this makes you more likely to convert. And then once you do convert, then, because you’re white, you’re more likely to get women. But the third issue is simply the correlations with gingerness and fair skin and whatever. Skin fairness—this paper, “Skin Fairness is a Better Predictor for Impaired Physical and Mental Health than Red Hair”—red-hairedness, as in scientific reports.
And what is found is that, in general, yeah, being—having ginger hair literally is associated with depression. It’s associated with anxiety. It’s associated with depression and associated, as I said earlier, with all kinds of other physical problems. So it may well be that for just genetic reasons—because of the newness, the novelty of gingerness, and the fact that it’s therefore associated with lots of mutations—one of those mutations which it’s associated with is a tendency toward depression.
And so that being the case—if, again, you would expect people that were ginger-haired to be more likely to have depression and anxiety, more likely therefore to have religious experiences—because when you’re feeling really down and depressed and stressed and horrible, then religious experiences will tend to hit in because it’s very bad for the body to feel like that. And then you feel a sense of—you feel amazing. You have a kind of narcissistic sense that you’re important and God loves you. And you adopt a new religion and a new identity, and then you feel good.
So that’s what’s going on. So basically, jihadi—ginger jihadis—the ginger jihadi phenomenon occurs because gingerness, particularly in men, is associated with depression and anxiety, and depression and anxiety are associated with having religious experiences, of having psychological collapses and converting—having a fundamental shift in identity. If you are depressed or whatever, you don’t know who you are, you’re asking all these questions, you have an unclear sense of identity—the world is a frightening place. A conversion experience—a dramatic conversion experience—gives you this feeling that God is real, that God is there, that God is talking to you, and not only that, but that God is associated with a certain set of ideas—in this case, Islam—and you convert to this, and then suddenly you have status, and you have importance, and life makes sense.
So that is why all the jihadis—all the white converts we see—are ginger. The key thing is the association between ginger hair and depression and anxiety for both environmental and possibly genetic reasons. I hope that helps, and salaam alaikum and goodbye.
