Why do ears have lobes

Credit: Getty. Hundreds of genes influence whether ear lobes dangle or are attached at the base. Human Genet. Download references. Article 10 NOV Article 03 NOV Albert Einstein College of Medicine Einstein. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Advanced search. And he can hang his utensils from his ear lobes so double bonus" and "I would've served my prawns in my ear holes if I were Seb". Flesh tunnels and flesh plugs, which are solid, have become more visible on our screens.

British fashion expert Gok Wan is also partial to large wooden ear plug adornments but it is not known if these are being used to stretch his lobe. Statistics are not easy to come by but, as with tattoos, there is extensive anecdotal evidence that ear stretching is on the rise.

More people are wearing them, DIY kits are more widely available and there is a much greater choice of jewellery. Marcus Mellor, from the Holier than Thou piercing parlour in Manchester, says ear stretching has become more popular in the last five or six years.

Practising what he pierces, Mellor has stretched both his ears. He says it used to be associated with hippies, punks or the rock crowd but now it is "all walks of life and not just students".

It can be discreet and people can hide it behind their hair in work. Ear stretching is in vogue, says Alix Fox, who writes the body modification section in the British alternative magazine Bizarre. Prof Victoria Pitts-Taylor, from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, says ear stretching has become popularised in the same way as other sub-cultural practices, such as tattooing and piercing.

The sociologist, who wrote In the Flesh: the Cultural Politics of Body Modification, says it started in the s and s with the rise of the body art movement and the "modern primitives", who appropriated practices from the "global supermarket" for various reasons such as showing solidarity with other cultures or to set themselves apart. Ear stretching has became more mainstream in the last decade and different people have become attracted to it because they see it on the catwalks and celebrities.

Hard-core modifiers have to up the ante to defy the commercialisation of the practice, Prof Pitts-Taylor suggests. The more you stretch the skin, the more commitment you are expressing to a counter cultural look. People who are obsessed with getting the largest stretch possible are known in the business as a "gauge queen" or "gauge king", according to Fox.

El Kollali classified earlobes into three types, based on whether the attachment angle was acute, right, or obtuse. To make the picture above, I searched for pictures of professional bicyclists because they have short hair , found 12 with their ears showing, and arranged them from free to attached. It doesn't look to me as if there are just two categories; instead, there is continuous variation in the height of the attachment point the "otobasion inferius" relative to the lowest point on the earlobe the "subaurale".

My own earlobes are exactly halfway in between the two extremes; I couldn't tell you whether my earlobes should be considered free or attached. However, all of the offspring of A x A matings had attached earlobes, and there were no F x F matings, so his data are consistent with either free or attached being dominant. Powell and Whitney looked at one family and concluded that attached earlobes were recessive. Wiener responded by pointing out that the "arbitrary classification into two sharply defined types All possible matings, from completely 0 x 0 to 3 x 3, produced some intermediate earlobes.

Wiener concluded that earlobes were determined by more than one gene, or by a singe gene with more than two alleles. Lai and Walsh called earlobes in which the lowest point on the earlobe was the attachment point "attached," and they classified all other earlobes as "free. If the myth were true, two parents with attached earlobes could not have a child with a free earlobe.

There are slightly more A offspring from A x A matings, but the large numbers of F offspring from A x A matings and A offspring from F x F matings indicate that this is not a one-locus, two-allele trait. They found a much stronger association between parents and offspring, but the five F offspring of A x A matings are inconsistent with the myth that this is a one-locus, two-allele trait. Earlobes do not fall into two categories, "free" and "attached"; there is continuous variation in attachment point, from up near the ear cartilage to well below the ear.

While there is probably some genetic influence on earlobe attachment point, family studies show that it does not fit the simple one-locus, two-allele myth. You should not use earlobe attachment to demonstrate basic genetics. Dutta, P. Further observations on ear lobe attachment.

Acta Genetica