from Websters http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=falsifiable
A full response would require a detailed explication of Popper, Kuhn, Lakatosh, and a half dozen others, but I shall not inflict that on you. Suffice it to say that the general model under which modern science operates is roughly Popperian, also known as hypothetico-deductivism. Oversimplified, what happens is that one devises a hypothesis that is consistent with known evidence. One then uses the hypothesis to make predictions about what we should find should we look in certain areas. Then we go look, and if the predictions are true, the theory is confirmed to some small degree. If they are false, then the hypothesis has been falsified and we start over.
A hypothesis which is not falsifiable, i.e., which does not make any predictions whose accuracy can be determined by going out and checking, is according to Popper not a scientific hypothesis at all. It is pseudoscientific babble. When the authors of your essay say their hypothesis is falsifiable, they mean that it makes predictions about what we should expect to find re: distribution of skin tones in relationship to environment, and that we can go out and check to see if those predictions hold. In other words, it’s a genuine scientific hypothesis. It accords with what we currently know, it attempts to explain a certain phenomena, and if it is wrong, we should be able to find out by examining the evidence.
This does not mean they think their hypothesis is likely to be false or something, which is what you seem to be implying.
I’m really not sure where to begin. But in summary Grienspace your whole thesis is full of holes, based on post hoc reasoning and inconsistent with the evidence.
First off Black people’ ancestors did NOT migrate to Australia. Or I should say that the evidence doesn’t support any such conclusion and largely contradicts it. The people who migrated to Austronesia originally were almost certainly yellow skinned, just as the various San, Bushmen and Hottentot people are today. Surprised to learn that the San aren’t black? Well they aren’t.they are yellow skinned. You are right that it is widely speculated that the Khoi-San best represents the origin of the human race and part of that is because they have a unique pigmentation structure where the melanin is stored within contained vesicles as opposed to the white, black and most yellow skin types where the melanin is dispersed.
That point alone blows a massive hole in your conclusion because the first humans under your scenario were yellow and they migrated into Austronesia as yellow. It is believed by some scientists that black skin in fact evolved in Austronesia and swept back form their into Africa. IOW yellow people gave rise to black people who gave rise to the black and ‘Asian yellow’ people.
The next major point is what John Mace has pointed out so well. You appear to completely misunderstand how genetic selection woks. You ask “Does anyone believe today that a black baby can’t survive to reproduce in Nunavut” The answer is “No”. Nobody does believe that. What scientists believe is that a black baby has a much smaller chance of surviving to reproduce. That is all that is required for the trait to be selected for. Nothing more. Let me ask you, do you believe that someone without Sickle Cell can survive to reproduce in the malaria zone? If you do then how can you explain the selection for Sickle Cell? It can only be explained because selection doesn’t need to be binary. It only needs to be differential.
Next massive problem is that your entire hypothesis hinges on white babies being suddenly born to a black tribe. That’s theoretically possible but is not possible at any meaningful rate. Even if one white baby is born every generation your hypothesis fails because you will never have a ‘tribe’ of white people who can be expelled. And in reality a black tribe won’t even produce on white baby every generation. Maybe every 30 or 40 generations.
This is a serious misunderstanding of the genetics of skin colour on your part Greinspace, and it makes a nonsense of your thesis. Skin colour is controlled by some 8 different genes, all codominant. For a tribe to be regularly producing white children they would need to have at least a 50% presence of pale genes. That means that on average the populaton would be olive skinned. Think Portugese or Southern Italian. You don’t; simply have Black tribes producing white children. Now that olive skin tone will be the AVERAGE complexion. Just as in Italy or Portugal there will necessarily always be some pale people born and some dark people born. That’s an unavoidalble outcome of a population of dark people who can produce white children at the frequencies your hypothesis relies on.
So what your hypothesis actually relies on is a situation where people in a tribe run the gamut form dark olive, Ethiopoan type complexion through olive to light brown. And then for some reason these diverse people will expel people who are AT BEST one shade lighter than otherpeople in the tribe.
That makes no sense whatsoever.
The next problem is sort of related. People only developed agriculture a few thousand years ago. Well after the racial traits you describe were already fixed. So at the time racial features were fixed people were HGs. A large HG tribe was 50 people. The vast majority of HG tribes consisted of one man, his one or two wives and a grandparent and children. How is a tribe of less than 10 individuals ever going to produce enough individuals of the correct skin colour to allow even a single man and woman to be explelled? For that to happen we’d have to have around 25% of children being born white, and for that to occur the average complexion would have to be extremely light Olive. IOW for enough white people to be produced in this situation to form a tribal nucleus the originating tribe would already have to be essentially white. And why would a white tribe expel white people?
This makes no sense whatsoever. It’s impossible.
The next problem is that you apparently have no idea of geography or racial distributions or the migration patterns they and genetic data indicate. Aside from the fact that yellowpeople and not black people migrated to Australia, they didn’t do so by “hugging the southern coast all the way””. In fact that is impossible. The Indian Ocean separates Australian from the southern coast of Africa and people couldn’t make that voyage even 1000 years ago, never mind 50, 000. people migrated to Australia via the Middle East, Central Asia thence to India, Indochina, Malaya, Indonesia. Note that this is precisely the same initial route as your hypothetical black an yellow races. This makes a nonsense of your hypothesis because these people all moved out in the same direction simultaneously while avoiding each other.
This makes no sense whatsoever. It’s impossible.
Which brings us neatly to the next problem. Africa is a big place. Really big. You think it’s along way down to the chemists, well compared to the length of Africa that’s peanuts. And so forth. So let’s assume (against all probability, logic and common sense) that somewhere in Africa an olive skinned tribe existed that produced enough slightly more olive skinned ‘white’ people to form a tribal nucleus and then for no discernible reason expelled them. Why would those white people leave Africa? Seriously, this is something you made no attempt to explain. Why would I, as a nucleus of a white tribe, lead my people from Tanzania to Iraq? Why wouldn’t I just stop at the first point where I could settle? Your entire thesis hinges on these white tribes walking out of Africa. If they just did the logical thing and simply settle in the first uninhabited region the came across why aren’t there a multitude of white tribes in Africa today? After all we know that there is no selective process working to produce black people in Africa. So why didn’t a white tribe expelled 80, 00 years ago just set up camp in Guinea and live there forever? Why did they pass through Guinea, through Ethiopia and then settle only in Iran?
Anyway that’s enough for me. There are numerous other massive logical holes and errors of fact and understanding in your posts. These are the just the major problems that make your entire thesis totally impossible. But quite frankly until you can answer these questions your whole thesis is just what it appears to be: nonsensical, psuedoscientific eugenic nonsense.
But does amount of sunlight correlate with skin tone? Snow reflects light.
The body produces vitamin D when UVB rays hit the skin. Vitamin D is important for humans, especially babies, to survive. Darker skin is more resistant to UVB rays. Therefore lighter skinned humans would be more able to survive in relatively low sunlit areas, unless vitamin D is supplemented by other means.
Your source simply does not support this statement you made earlier, which is what I was objecting to:
Now, if you meant to say that SOME people in the far north are darker skinned than SOME people in the south, you’d be correct. No one is arguing that lattitude correlates perfectly with skin tone. Given the many, many migrations that have taken place, some quite recently, it would be absurd to expect such a correlation.
Comparing Europeans and Amerindians, for example, is problematic because modern humans have been living in Europe for about 40,000 years, whereas the oldest verified human occupation site in the Americas (Monte Verde, Chile) is only about 12,500 years old.
Just a random comment to throw into the melee - even factors that increase mortality after childbearing age can still statistically affect the survival potential of your offspring, in social animals. If your parents (and maybe grandparents) are still alive, you might be able to leave them in charge of the camp and kids while you go out hunting/gathering - if your parents/grandparents died of skin cancer, you may have to take the kids with you (and be less productive in your hunting/gathering) or leave them relatively unattended at the camp (and at risk of accidental injury or predation etc).
As others have said, it’s too easy to take a term like ‘survival of the fittest’ and interpret it to mean instant death for those who are less than fit. In reality, it’s nothing like this - in order to survive an encounter with a tiger, you don’t have to outrun the tiger, you only have to outrun the slowest of your peers - this isn’t survival of the fittest, it’s destruction of the weakest.
Likewise, you might be slightly more or less successful than your peers in terms of gathering food - you and your family might not die outright, but the malnutrition might put you out of breeding condition, whereas a small increase in your food-gathering success might have enabled you to have another child.
Evolution is a statistical process - very hard to describe or attribute properly at the individual level, but if one population has some genetic advantage that makes them 0.1% more successful at reproductive survival than another, then (notwithstanding catastrophic extinction) over a very long period of time, the population of the more successful group will gradually outcompete the other.
Well put. The “grandmother hypothesis” in hominid evolution suggests that we are among the longest-lived mammals because grandparents are useful, thereby selected.
The other end of the life-cycle is also sometimes forgotten. A point that I tried to make in my essay was that people whose skin tone was maladapted to both incident UV and diet were less prolific. But my point was not that their children died at a higher rate than the complexionwise well-adapted, but that their rate of miscarriages was higher. Kids born with spina bifida (too much UV penetrated the pregnant mother’s skin) or rickets (too little) are the marginally survivable tip of a much larger iceberg–fetusses that spontaneously aborted.
Frank W. Sweet
http://backintyme.com/essay021215.htm
The American anthropologist Carleton Coon (circa 1930s) believed he had found traces of this very early eastward migration of dark-skinned peoples with African characteristics all the way across the southern edge of Asia.
Coon (ironic name, that) was a racialist and used his “science” as it was understood in those days to define and classify races. I’m not saying he was an out-and-out racist, in the sense that he believed nonwhites to be inferior, but he was a racialist who believed in the reality of different human races, which could be identified through skull measurements. He traveled with his calipers across Arabia and northeastern Africa, measuring hundreds of skulls everywhere he went.
Even though his racialist theories have been exploded by more modern science, Coon had an interesting concept. In a paper on the Jabal Qara people of Dhofar in southern Oman, south Arabia, he postulated the earliest dark-skinned inhabitants of Asia had been pushed down to the ends of large Asian peninsulas by later arrivals. Thus the Jabal Qara people of southern Arabia, the Veddas of Sri Lanka, and the Negritos of the Malay peninsula. (Also the Andaman Islanders?)Coon saw the Jabal Qara people as racially similar to the Veddas vis-à-vis physical anthropology, and culturally similar to East Africans.
The Jabal Qara people were the only cow herders in Arabia, but they did not domesticate the camel, unlike all other Arabians. Their cattle-herding culture made them more similar to East Africans. In terms of physical anthropology they were classed as “Veddoid,” a small race that is practically extinct and is not the same as any of the better-known racial categories like Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid, etc. Unfortunately, the distinctive culture of Jabal Qara was demolished during the Omani civil war during the 1960s and 1970s. The people were displaced from their ancestral land in Dhofar and became refugees in urban slum areas.
Apropos of nothing, and probably of interest only to historians of science, as it turns out, Carleton Coon really was a racist as well. He not only lent his name to the fight for Jim Crow and against the civil rights movement of 1955-1965, but he personally worked to that end. A good review of Coon’s papers on this topic is Jonathan Marks, “Racial Anthropology: Retrospective on Carleton Coon’s The Origin of Races (1962),” Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 84 (2000). Anyone curious may download a copy of the article from http://backintyme.com/rawdata/marks01.pdf.
Despite this flaw, Coon was a great scientist whose findings from craniofacial anthropometry are still taught. (Anyone who has recently taken a Physical Anthro lab on forensics knows what I mean.)
The most popular anecdote told about him is that long after he retired, just before he died in 1981, he was watching a TV news show featuring the president of the Congo (I think it was Patrice Lumumba). Coon grew increasingly agitated as he watched the man speak. His fingers moved as if the old man were grasping his beloved calipers. “That is not a Congolese skull!” he exclaimed.
Frank W. Sweet