Doctor Who Splurge-o-rama

I guess the question I’m going to ask will sound stupid, but I mean it in all seriousness. I just watched an episode of Doctor Who that threw it into my head, and I’ve struggled to answer. So I’m going to ask a few people and see what they think.

Now, for a little background for people unfamiliar with Doctor Who, he is an alien Time Lord – a species from a planet called Gallifrey. In a nutshell, he’s not human but resembles one. Aside from all of the abilities of these Gallifreyans (or Gallifrii, whatever you fancy!) have compared to us humans, they are biologically alien too. In the 2005/6 Christmas special, The Doctor (played by David Tennant) asks his companion (played by Billie Piper) a truly interesting, mind-blowing question: “Am I ginger?” To which she replies ‘no’ as he has brown hair. He then follows “Damn, I always wanted to be ginger.”

Aside from laughing my head off at this scene, it made me think. Does the ginger gene exist on Gallifrey? Now hold on while I explain a bit more…

See, the question I’m asking is a huge one, because it questions what makes us really ginger (I am not ginger, by the way). We know it as a hereditary, recessive genetic trait these days, coded somewhere into our DNA. Within areas where the trait is carried commonly, the gene can have a one in four chance of determining a child’s hair colour (though it most times seems to be pure luck when it comes to hair). So people with ginger hair become a decided minority in any society, by virtue of their comparative outnumbering by other prevalent hair colours.

But what about Gallifrey? We have a number of Time Lords portrayed in the series (though by human actors). They are predominantly black, brown or grey haired…. Oh wait. There’s a ginger Doctor! Colin Baker played the sixth doctor from 1984-1986, so 27 years ago really. Apart from the obvious myriad loopholes – such as that Doctor Who is fictional and the people playing Gallifreyans are actually humans, or that the Time Lord could have simply taken the form of Colin Baker, but was entirely different or incorporeal, and many others - it still raises a funny hypothetical:  that some Gallifreyans are ginger.

Now let me add a bit more to the formula. I’ve recently been coming across the notion that DNA is a common part of all life found on earth. In a BBC  television show of his, Prof. Brian Cox performed a small procedure with his spit, mixing it with a couple of common chemicals in a glass test tube, in order to isolate the DNA in it. It was amazing – I love watching stuff like that. But he went on to discuss how every encountered and tested living species shares DNA, in various arrangements of the 4 constituent parts. Those arrangements can be codified to map out all the possible permutations of the individual DNA samples, and see how species become, or became, species in the first place! So I thought then, ‘gosh that stuff is so rudimental and amazing, it’s like God or something. What if life on the opposite side of the universe has exactly the same stuff, and it was some fundamental matter formed at the Big Bang, and thrown out in part right at the start of the universe. Would that species have DNA too? And if so, do they have ginger hair?’

So I guess what I’m really asking is, are there ginger aliens?

And for the sake of finishing this, I’m going to say yes!